Development of Pen-based Note-Taking System for Blind People

When we attend class, we frequently take notes. The method of taking note means writing much information as a paper record. However, we cannot write it down in the notebook if there is no visual feedback information. We propose a pen-based note-taking system, which is named the 'pen-talker' on the ultra mobile PCs for blind person. A blind novice user with acquired blindness is able to input Japanese characters directly instead of a keyboard without well training by using the pen-talker. This paper describes system design concept of the system. We also investigate a higher recognition engine based on the hybrid recognition, which is integration of on-line and off-line recognition algorithm, and we restructure the input interface by the ultra mobile PC with a voice assistance function. Screen information is given to user via built-in a screen reader. Therefore the 'pen-talker' can be used as a note pad software using a simple button operation for even blind novice user. As a result of the recognition experiment, recognition accuracy has improved to 93.3% for eight blind subjects. This is an extremely high score compared with the previous our system. Consequently, we confirmed the practical use possibility of the proposed system.