VMAIL SYSTEM FOR BLIND PEOPLE
Er.Thomas Joseph1 , Asiya Shajahan2, Maria Cherian3, Reema Mariam Rajan4,
Saran Chandran5
1Asst.Professor Department of computer science and engineering, SAINTGITS college of engineering, Kottayam, Kerala, India
2UG Scholar Department of computer science and engineering, SAINTGITS college of engineering, Kottayam, Kerala, India
3UG Scholar Department of computer science and engineering, SAINTGITS college of engineering, Kottayam, Kerala, India
4UG Scholar Department of computer science and engineering, SAINTGITS college of engineering, Kottayam, Kerala, India
5UG Scholar Department of computer science and engineering, SAINTGITS college of engineering, Kottayam, Kerala, India
1
Abstract- Email is considered as one of the most pervasive forms of communication. However all these technologies can be of no use to the people who are visually impaired as all activities that can be performed on the computer is based on visual perception. Voice based email system would help visually impaired people to access email in a hassle free manner. The decision making depends upon the eye sight and by reading everything that appears on the screen. So the computer and information age is not for the blind. a voice based email system that would help visually impaired people to access email.. The GUI of this system has been evaluated against the interface of the traditionally available mail system. Alongwith the blinds the illiterates can also benefit from this system.
Keywords: Voice based email;Speech recognition.
1.INTRODUCTION
It is estimated to be visually impaired worldwide are around 285 million people ,In that 39 million are blind and 246 have low vision. As a technical student it turned out to be the moral responsibility to give something back to society and use our technical knowledge to build an application for their benefit[3].Due to lack of privacy and security, for a visually impaired person the existing system‟s does not provide a complete voice based mail system. Thus there emerged a need to create a complete voice based mail system for such people. So that they can send or receive the emails with ease providing security and privacy. In formal communication Email has turned out to be an importantpart. In professional world for people who can see, emailing is not a big deal, but for people who are not blessed with ability of vision or those who lose vision due to any accidents or disease it poses a key concern because of its intersection with many vocational responsibilities[3]. Hence VMAIL turns out to be an mail system through which they can send or receive emails not only easily but securely too[3].
Today in the information age computer has become a integral part of everybodys life. The blind people cannot read the information and cannot view the mouse cursor to give command to the computer. They cannot access their mail and cannot send a mail. Thus the computer becomes a impractical thing for the blind people and information retrieval a tedious job[2]. We are going to develop a voice based mail system for the blind and then transform the information into voice for the blind people to hear it and also keep a option of writemail,send mail,inbox,delete.
The systems available nowadays uses screen readers which read information displayed on desktop or it prints information on Braille printer. ASR (Automatic speech recognizer) and TTS (text to speech) get used for converting speech to text and vice versa. Although these technologies are being improved continuously, some major problems still persist which make them unusable as a way of accessing email to a large segment of Blind people. These systems have following drawbacks.
- With the help of screen readers it is difficult for blind person to access E-mail system and computer operating easily. Because it has noisy audio interface .
- ASR is still in development stage. In case of noisy environment performance of ASR degrade.
- Both ASR and TTS are highly language dependent. So the system developed for one language is not applicable to other.
- These systems are not very much useful for small scale application for E-mail.
- These available systems require use of keyboard which is very difficult for blind people to recognize and remember characters of keyboard.
Keeping in view all of these, goal of our project is to reduce limitations and problems mentioned above[2].
Hence, in order to avoid the drawbacks of the current available systems, we are developing an email system that will help these blind people in many ways. It provides a voice based mailing service where they could read and send mail on their own, without any guidance. Here, the users have to use certain keywords which will perform certain actions for e.g. Inbox, Send mail, write Mail, delete etc. The mail composed by the user via voice will be converted to text before sending it to the receiver.It using voice to text conversion. Receiver can hear the mail by using text to voice conversion.The VMAIL system can be used by a blind person to access mails easily and efficiently.
This system will help in overcoming some drawbacks that were earlier faced by the blind people in accessing emails. We have eliminated the concept of using keyboard shortcuts along with screen readers which will help reducing the cognitive load of remembering keyboard shortcuts. Also any naive user who does not know the location of keys on the keyboard need not worry as keyboard usage is eliminated[1]. Thus reliance of visually impaired on other people for their activities related to mail can be reduced.
2.LITERATURE REVIEW
The advancement in computer based accessible systems has opened up many avenues for the visually impaired across a wide majority of the globe.Audio feedback based virtual environment like the screenreaders have helped blind people to access internet application immensely.
However a large section of visually impaired people in different countries in particular the indian subcontinent couldnot benefit much from such systems.This was primarly due to the difference in technology required for indian languages compared to those corresponding to other popular languages of the world.
Speech recognition is a technology that able a computer to capture the words spokenby ahuman with a help of microphone .These words are later on recognized by speech recognizer,and in the end,the system outputs the recognized words. An ideal situation in the process of speech recognition is that,a speech recognition engine recognizes all words uttered by a human but ,practically the performance of a speech recognition engine depends on number of factors.Vocabularies,multiple users and noisy environment are the major factors that are counted in as the depending factors for a speech recognition engine.
In our system the HTML5 Speech Recognition API allows Javascript to have access to a browsers audio stream and convert it to text.Here using the webkitSpeechRecognition object to perform speech recognition.
3.ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
DFD LEVEL O
DFD LEVEL 1
If not found
If found & matched
DFD LEVEL 2
Search If not
Probability found
Match in database
Fig1:Work Flow Diagram
4.IMPLEMENTATION
Module 1: Designing ASR webpages
The work of our project started with the creation of a user interface for our project. In our mail system we created a login page followed by a home page which is then linked to the composed page,draft page and delete page. In the login page we enter thecorresponding user name and password to login toour system. After logging in, home page gets displayed and the arrived mails is displayed to the user. The coding is done completely in mvc frame work.
Module 2:Voice to text conversion
Our project is completely based on voice recognition of the user. The voice to text conversion take place in all the pages except the inbox page.
Module 3: Text to voice conversion
In this module text to voice conversion is done in .NET frame work.The text to voice conversion take place in the home page.
Since the system is for the visually challenged people who are naïve to computers or have very little experience in using technologies available to assist them in using the computers we have kept continuous prompting done by the system in language understandable to them. The user will just need to follow the instruction specified and perform actions according to their need. As the users are considered naïve to computer systems, we are not keeping any functionality in which use of keyboard related operations are used. The complete website will work on just mouse click operations and speech commands.
4.1.1.Login
This module will perform authentication check every time the user would require accessing his/her account. It will accept username and password in speech format and convert it to text. This text will then be used to authenticate the users. Once the user is found authentic s/he is redirected to their respective homepage. Only a registered user can login to the system.
4.1.2.Homepage
Once the user successfully logs in the homepage will be displayed. The homepage will contain all links of operation that needs to be performed by the system. Simultaneous prompting will help the user choose the option required. The options available are:
1) Inbox
2) Compose
3) Sent mail
4) Delete
4.1.3.Sent Mail
The mails sent by the user will be stored in this option. This will help the user access mails that were sent by him/her. User will be prompted as to which mouse operations are to be performed in order to gain access to specific operations. As the user navigates between mails he/she will be prompted about the receiver and subject of that mail. This will provide ease of access to users.
4.1.4.Inbox
The user canhearall the mails received to the account through this option. Once in this option the system will be continuously prompting the user about which click operation needs to be performed to navigate through the page and perform operations on the received mail. The user also has the option to delete the mails received. The deleted mails received. The deleted mails will be stored in the trash section.
4.1.5.Compose Mail
This is the most important module of the complete system[1]. Once in this module user can create the mail he/she wants to send. Since the system is for visually challenged people.So keyboard operations and mouse operations are completely avoided composing mail would only be done on voice input .No typed input will be required.The main difference between the existing system and our system is that unlike other normal system our system will ask for recording and it will be converted to text form and will be send as an attachment to the other end. The user will be prompted continuously about the mouse click operations that needs to be performed to access the system.
4.1.6.Delete
The mails that will be deleted by the user will be saved in this section. User can delete mails from both inbox as well as sent mail option. This option will help the user to retrieve mails that were deleted by user at that time but are required currently.
5.EXPIRIMENT
Email is considered as one of the major ways of communication in today's world.To access an emailing system people requires the visual capabilties.It means that all emailing systems that are available today are of no use to the people who are visually impaired. In order to make the system useful to them various technologies like automatic speech recognizers ,speech to text,text to speech converter ,traditional braille keyboard are made available. But still they are facing some hardships and will not give the accurate response as a normal system does to a normal user.
Our project aims to develop an emailing system that is purely voice based and overcomes the above mentioned drawbacks. It reduces the work load while uses the mailing system available today.
VMAIL,voice based mailing system for blinds, works purely based on the voice instructions given by the user. So that the blind person need not remember the positions of the keys in the keyboard ,specific mouse click operations etc..and also it reduces the cognitive work load while going for the traditional braille systems.
All process that are in the normal mail system are made available in our system also. The user can send the mail,read the mail,save the mail,delete the mail etc..but the difference is that all such processing are happened through the voice command. For example in the login page we have the user id and the password, The blind person pronounce “user name” and the field for user name become active, the blind person gives the user id.Then the blind person pronounce “password” and the field for password become active , the blind person gives the password. All these processes are worked by voice responses from the blind person. Reset button resets the page. Login button logs in blind person and responds back to him/her that the corresponding person has successfully logged in.
6.FUTURE SCOPE
The system developed now will be working only on desktops .In the future security features to be implemented during login phase can be revised to make the system more secure. To address this problem, we will develop a new touch screen authentication method “PASS CHORDS” that is entirely non-visual, faster than PIN techniques, and robust to aural eavesdropping. PassChords are a new authentication technique based on Input FingerDetection, where a user taps a touch surface several times with 1 to 4 fingers.This will be our project’s future prospective.
7.CONCLUSION
The VMAIL System is a Voice Based Mail System which help the visually impaired people to access mails easily and efficiently.It provides a voice based mailing service where the blind person could read and send mail their own without the help of others. Existing Systems are using keyboard shortcuts along with screen readers. It need basic information about keyboard shortcuts used or where the keys are located. It gives cognitive load to blinds and is time consuming.
We have eliminated all these concepts and overcomed all difficulties faced by blinds.In VMAIL there is no need to remember location of keys on the keyboard and type characters using traditional Braille keywords available to them.Also eliminated the mouse click,because mouse pointer access is difficult for visually impaired people. It using speech recognition API which provide an efficient voice input method for mailing devices for blind .It also helps handicapped and illiterate people.
References
[1]“Voice based email system for blinds"T.Shabana1 , A.Anam2 , A.Rafiya3 , K.Aisha4 Assistant Professor, Computer Engineering, M.H. SabooSiddik College of Engineering, Mumbai, India 1 UG Student, Computer Engineering, M.H. SabooSiddik College of Engineering, Mumbai,International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer and Communication Engineering Vol. 4, Issue 1, January 2015
[2]“Voice Based System in Desktop andMobile Devices for Blind People”JagtapNilesh, Pawan Alai, ChavhanSwapnil and BendreM.R..,In International Journal of Emerging Technology and AdvancedEngineering (IJETAE), 2014 on Pages 404-407 (Volume 4, issue2).
[3]“VMAIL: Voice Based Email Application"Rahul Anwani Usha Santuramani Deeksha Raina Priya R.L, International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technologies, Vol. 6 (3) , 2015, 2488-2490
[4]“Voice Based Search Engine and Web page Reader”,UmmuhanysifaU.NizarBanu P K, InInternational Journal of Computational Engineering Research (IJCER).Pages 1-5.
[5]“An Interactive Email for Visually Impaired”,G. Shoba, G. Anusha, V. Jeevitha, R. Shanmathi,. In International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer and Communication Engineering(IJARCCE), 2014 on Pages 5089-5092. (Volume 3, Issue 1).
1