Roy Shilkrot, Jochen Huber, Meng Ee Wong, Pattie Maes, Suranga Chandima Nanayakkara
April 18, 2015
Roy Shilkrot, Jochen Huber, Meng Ee Wong, Pattie Maes, Suranga Chandima Nanayakkara
Accessing printed text in a mobile context is a major challenge for the blind. A preliminary study with blind people reveals numerous difficulties with existing state-of-the-art technologies including problems with alignment, focus, accuracy, mobility and efficiency. In this paper, we present a finger-worn device, FingerReader, that assists blind users with reading printed text on the go. We introduce a novel computer vision algorithm for local-sequential text scanning that enables reading single lines, blocks of text or skimming the text with complementary, multimodal feedback. This system is implemented in a small finger-worn form factor, that enables a more manageable eyes-free operation with trivial setup. We offer findings from three studies performed to determine the usability of the FingerReader.