NOTOG: An Android App for Detecting and Reading Arabic Texts for Vision Impaired People

Smartphone applications (apps) are used today to accomplish most of daily life tasks. On another side, vision impaired people may find it hard to distinguish written words on smartphones. This may make them struggle when using different apps and isolate them from rest of the digital word. Moreover, a number of Text-To-Speech (TTS) apps were developed to help the vision impaired to understand different texts. However, the number of TTS apps which support Arabic text is very low. As a result of that, we were motivated to develop NOTOG as an Android TTS application for reading Arabic and English texts. The proposed app allows the user to create a personal account, arrange processed files in folders, and insert text files in different ways. NOTOG was practically evaluated by preparing a survey and asking a group of users to fill it after a one-month test period. The survey’s outcomes have revealed very positive responses to our app. As a future work, we plan to add new languages to the app, to enhance the system so that it can recognize informal Arabic language in addition to technical terminologies, and to build an IOS version for Apple phone users.