Braille to Text Convertor for Sinhala

Abstract

The instantaneous conversion of written brail symbols to readable text of any language has been a hurdle for many educators specialized in the field of visual disabilities so far. Various solutions have been proposed in this regard and nothing has hitherto been viable and successful. Different Braille converter software for different languages is currently available only by means of one-way conversion capabilities. However, a direct conversion tool that translates Braille to Sinhala is not yet available in mobile and desktop platforms. Hence the visually impaired Academic students of Sri Lanka, who work with Braille, suffer a lot. Their teachers also have faced numerous problems because they can’t understand Braille. This conversion engine will easily convert the Braille text into the corresponding Sinhala document and will assist the learning process of visually impaired academic students of Sri Lanka. A scanning-based input is incorporated in this system because the brail print materials which are expected to be converted through this software need to be subjected to an optical character reading process tailor-made for the purpose. Six dots are used to create brail symbols. This system identifies these distinct symbols using a specially constructed framework and compares them against a database of symbols in compiling the final output which comes as Sinhala Unicode characters. This system is expected to expedite the paper marking process of the visually impaired students on par with the other ordinary students and therefore shall effectively reduce or abolish the waiting time for those students when receiving their results. It also could work as a more credible method of translation which avoids the inaccuracies caused by human errors in the process of manual translation. Hence the marking which take place based on the answer scripts converted using this tool can be more credible and transparent in the marking process as well.