Read2Me: A cloud-based reading aid for the visually impaired

For the visually-impaired segment of the population, the inability to read has a substantive negative impact on their quality of life. Printed text (books, magazines, menus, labels, etc.) still represents a sizable portion of the information this group needs to have unrestricted access to. Hence, developing methods by which text can be retrieved and read out loud to the blind is critical. In this work, we discuss the design and implementation of two assistive platforms, in one, we combine todays' smartphone capabilities with the advantages offered by the rapidly growing cloud resources, and the other utilizes a more economical approach making use of cost-effective microcontrollers. Both approaches make us of an Optical character Recognition (OCR) engine on the cloud and use local resources for the Text-to-Speech (TTS) conversion. Prototypes are successfully developed and tested with favorable results.