Accessibility and Design for All Solutions Through Speech Technology
The advent of computer-based speech-processing systems like speech synthesisers (SS) and speech recognisers (SR) has brought mankind a promising way of realising the fundamental need for spoken communication by enabling automatic speech-mediated communica
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Accessibility and Design for All Solutions Through Speech Technology Diamantino Freitas
14.1 Introduction The advent of computer-based speech-processing systems like speech synthesisers (SS) and speech recognisers (SR) has brought mankind a promising way of realising the fundamental need for spoken communication by enabling automatic speech-mediated communication. The acoustic medium and speech can be used to implement a high potential communication channel in an alternative, or augmentative, way to improve accessibility to communication for persons with special needs. It takes speech-processing both for speech input and output into consideration, and is presently a well-defined and visible trend in communication technology. Moreover, it is assumed that the solutions for communication difficulties of disabled persons can also bring advantages for non-disabled persons by providing redundancy, and therefore higher comfort, in the use of the communication systems. This chapter provides a brief presentation of the problems as well as current and future solutions for the specific situations of the visually disabled, the mobility impaired, the speech impaired, the hearing impaired and the elderly. Problems found generally in physical locations, principally in built public sites, as well as in transportation, require special attention, as they require that one can use navigation systems and have access to the information. The chapter discusses accessibility issues also in the telecommunications environment with reference to the main projects in the area. In order to examine what main benefits can be extracted from the use of speech technology today and in the near future, the final chapter discusses issues concerning access to complex documents in e-learning environments, and in instructional games and ebooks.
D. Freitas (B) Speech Processing Laboratory, University of Porto, Faculty of Engineering, 4250-066 Porto, Portugal e-mail: [email protected]
F. Chen, K. Jokinen (eds.), Speech Technology, DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-73819-2_14, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
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D. Freitas
14.1.1 Text and Speech Media It may be surprising to introduce Design-for-All (DFA) speech-processing solutions by discussing text features. However, text is an essential medium in all communication, due to its fundamental role in providing a representation for the communication contents in close relationship with spoken natural language. It is also a light and inherently compressed medium in regard to the technical code used, and thus one of the preferred media for the computer representation of complex information. Text representation has evolved a lot and acquired new dimensions when markup languages were created to merge tags and structure information (i.e. document type description – DTD) into the text stream that made it a more complete communication medium. If we consider these characteristics, together with mark-up technology, then it should be understandable that we dedicate a few moments to it in our discussion of sp
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