There are also many interface design issues to resolve when accommodating the needs of the elderly visually impaired. This project is funded by ONCE, Organisation Nacional de Ciegos Espanoles, the national organisation for blind people in Spain. Oxford Brookes University is working with The Natural Language Processing Group at the University of Barcelona to produce a Web browser for the blind and visually impaired which speaks and functions in either English or Spanish. The new system will be able to set up the browser in either language, detect the language of the page the user has accessed and switch to the appropriate speech synthesiser. We are developing a natural language dialogue interface for BrookesTalk our Web browser for the blind and visually impaired.
Speech recognition is handled by a standard package to create an input text string.
The work involves the development of grammatical and semantic rules to parse natural language text input and create a data structure to hold the results. Using encapsulated knowledge a database is set up to map natural language objects to system specific objects to create commands. Natural language speech output is also created. Access for all The Speech Project is a member of an international group concerned with the challenges faced by non-technology enabled people in joining the Information Society. A large proportion of elderly visually impaired people fall into this group.