Project Nethra - an intelligent assistant for the visually disabled to interact with internet services

In the modern era where computers play a prominent role in day to day life, visually disabled users have found it challenging to keep up with the modern advancements in computers and internet usage forming a `digital divide'. Project Nethra is an intelligent virtual assistant for the visually disabled, which provides a voice based medium for visually disabled users. It allows the target users to interact with computers and internet based services with a wide array of functionality based on various internet services and social media. With Nethra, tasks will be done for the user instead of just returning search results. Project Nethra will listen and detect what the user says and responds to user's requests in a friendly, effective manner via voice in a manner of a conversation. There are four main components of the system; the voice recognition module, the natural language processing module, conversational agent and the content extraction module. This is a much faster and interactive solution than regular assistive software for the visually disabled. The existing screen reader software are not suitable for accessing World Wide Web because of the minimum support they provide for web content and the lack of voice recognition. The Virtual Assistant software available in the market are not specifically catered for visually disabled. All the mainstream solutions were analyzed and compared with project Nethra in order to substantiate that the proposed solution is the most optimal and would bridge the `digital divide' that exists between sighted and visually disabled users.