Enhancing Blind Education: Braille to Speech Conversion

Braille is a testament to the pursuit of accessibility and inclusion in education and literacy for the visually impaired. It is a tactile writing system used by the visually impaired to write, read, and learn like a normal person. The Braille system alphabet includes punctuations, symbols, letters, numbers, etc. This paper introduces a Braille-to-speech system using the Arduino UNO microprocessor and simple push-buttons which makes it more cost-effective and easy to use. According to WHO (World Health Organization) estimates, there are around 39 million visually impaired individuals in the world today, and it is estimated that one-third of them live in poverty, making expensive devices made of high processing technologies unaffordable. This served as a motivation to develop this system, providing the blind with cost-effective and easy-to-use technologies that are the need of the hour. The proposed system consists of two main subsystems : a) converting Braille input into text and b) text-to-speech (TTS) models for audio conversion, which is the final expected output. The objectives of this proposed system are to improve accessibility for visually impaired users, demonstrating promising accuracy and usability through user testing. Future improvements include the quality of speech synthesis using signal processing techniques and integration of Braille displays.