Hindawi Mobile Information Systems Volume 2020, Article ID 3461651, 14 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/3461651 Research Article Analysis and Evaluation of Braille to Text Conversion Methods Sana Shokat,1 Rabia Riaz,1 Sanam Shahla Rizvi,2 Khalil Khan,1 Farina Riaz,3 and Se Jin Kwon 4 1 e University of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Muzaffarabad 13100, Pakistan 2Raptor Interactive (Pty) Ltd., Eco Boulevard, Witch Hazel Ave, Centurion 0157, South Africa 3University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia 4Department of Computer Engineering, Kangwon National University, Samcheok 25806, Republic of Korea Correspondence should be addressed to Se Jin Kwon; [email protected] Received 14 February 2020; Revised 5 May 2020; Accepted 4 June 2020; Published 26 July 2020 Academic Editor: Ali Kashif Bashir Copyright © 2020 Sana Shokat et al. ,is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Technology is advancing rapidly in present times. To serve as a useful and connected part of the community, everyone is required to learn and update themselves on innovations. Visually impaired people fall behind in this regard because of their inherent limitations. To involve these people as active participants within communities, technology must be modified for their facilitation. ,is paper provides a comprehensive survey of various user input schemes designed for the visually impaired for Braille to natural language conversion. ,ese techniques are analyzed in detail with a focus on their accessibility and usability. Currently, con- siderable effort has been made to design a touch-screen input mechanism for visually impaired people, such as Braille Touch, Braille Enter, and Edge Braille. All of these schemes use location-specific input and challenge visually impaired persons to locate specified places on the touch screen. Most of the schemes require special actions to switch between upper and lowercase and between numbers and special characters, which affects system usability. ,e key features used for accessing the performance of these techniques are efficiency, accuracy, and usability issues found in the applications. In the end, a comparison of all these techniques is performed. Outcomes of this analysis show that there is a strong need for application that put the least burden on the visually impaired users. Based on this survey, a guideline has been designed for future research in this area. 1. Introduction usage consists of educational activities. Although smart- phone usage has increased exponentially, it has low prev- Visually impaired people are an important part of every alence among people with visual disabilities. ,ere are many community [1]. ,ey are also concerned in learning the complex accessibility issues that must be resolved in order to details of everything they encounter in their daily life [2]. ,e enable the full inclusion of this community [6]. Accessibility total number of visually impaired people is 2.2 billion; issues have been an important research domain over the last among them, 36 million are completely blind, and rest of the few years promoting the development of thousands of 1 billion have moderate to severe vision impairment [3]. smartphone applications to help people with a visual dis- Approximately thirty-seven million of the six billion ability, e.g., voiceOver services, talkback services, screen populations worldwide are suffering from blindness. Un- readers, and navigators. fortunately, 80% of blind people live in developing countries ,ese researches resulted in a dramatic increase in with restricted facilities for them [4]. mobile-screen reader usage for the visually impaired, from Smartphones have become an integral part of everyday 12% in 2009 to 88% in 2019 [7]. Despite the benefits that life. An expected increase of smartphone users will increase smart devices can offer, if the learning applications are not up to nine billion by 2022 [5]. ,e widespread use of properly designed, their touch-screen interfaces may place smartphones has brought significant changes in how people an extra burden on blind learners. ,ere are features such as learn. Research indicates that about one-third of smartphone VoiceOver for iPhone that help blind users interact with 2 Mobile Information Systems their device and browse content. However, educational applications often fail to consider the interaction patterns of 1 4 blind learners with smart devices. ,e language visually impaired people use for reading and writing is known as Braille, which was designed by Louis Braille. It is composed of six raised dots that can be easily written by visually impaired [8]. His design is illustrated in Figure 1. Each Braille character is represented using a 2 5 combination of six dots arranged in a 3 by 2 matrix [9]. ,e Braille code system has been widely adopted in several communities because of its simplicity and comfort. Braille has been supported by different languages such as English, Arabic, and Hindi, among others [10]. However, 3 6 few studies have been conducted on Braille for smartphones. Research on Braille to text conversion has been carried out in the USA, Canada, India, Pakistan, and France. ,e Figure literature shows that majority of the conducted research is 1: Braille Dots. limited to the USA and Canada. ,is indicates that there is a considerable demand for such a study in the rest of the world ,is paper comprises the following sections. Section 2 [6]. gives a detail insight into the previous studies that have been With the advancement of technology, Braille scripting designed for entering Braille data. Section 3 describes the mechanisms became an important research domain. Within methodology in detail. Input methods are compared and this category, an initial device called Perkins Brailler was evaluated in Section 4. Usability issues gathered from dif- introduced to facilitate Braille writing. Space, backspace, and ferent studies are also included in this section. Section 5 line space keys were designed in Perkins Brailler, as well as concludes the paper and gives future recommendations. keys corresponding with each of the six dots in the Braille code [11]. In 2008, a lighter and quieter version was developed 2. Previous Work and launched that included an erase key and integrated carrying handle, which was not available in Perkins Brailler. ,is survey paper provides a review of the current state-of- Another adaptation of the Perkins Brailler, the SMART the-art Braille input methods. In this section, we provide a Brailler, was created by David S. Morgan and released in detailed insight into the problems with these schemes when 2011 [12]. Along with the existing features, Smart Brailler these are used by visually impaired people. Based on the also included text-to-speech functionality in several lan- current survey, we have identified new directions for future guages. With the advent of computers, many users created research. In recent years, many studies have been conducted Braille output by connecting a computer and Braille em- to make Braille more technology-assisted. To analyze these bosser. Visually impaired users were able to read the studies, we have broadly divided the Braille input mecha- computer screen using screen reader computer software nism into two main categories: and/or Braille displays. Another similar Braille recognition (i) Scanned Input system was designed by [13]. In this scheme, images were distributed into three threshold values, and Braille charac- (ii) Touch-Screen-based Input ters were subsequently recognized. Effectively, this inter- pretation was used to create a suitable dictionary. Recent 2.1. Scanned Input. In the scanned Braille input, Braille Dots research has focused on eliminating the need for separate hardware in Braille scripting. Application-level software has are extracted from Braille sheets using a scanner and, then, been designed to facilitate Braille users. converted into text using optical character recognition, as ,is survey focuses on gathering the difficulties faced by shown in Figure 2. In this mechanism, visually impaired visually impaired while using a computing-based Braille users give input on sheets without any interaction with a input mechanism. Many technology-oriented applications computing device. for the visually impaired are available. Only those appli- cations are considered for these surveys that are part of 2.1.1. Arabic Optical Braille Recognition System. A study was research taking place in different countries. Studied appli- conducted that takes input from a flatbed scanner, as it cations were analyzed and compared based on matrices clearly displayed the Braille Dots. ,e scanned image was related to usability issues for touch-screen-based Braille converted into grayscale, the image frame was cropped, and input methods. ,ese evaluations bring forward the the resulting image was stored in a 2D array. To remove the strengths and weaknesses of current schemes with a special skewness in the framed image, an algorithm was designed. focus on usability. No such study exists in the literature, so Finally, the Braille cells were recognized. ,ey achieved this paper can provide guidelines to the researchers for approximately 99% accuracy for Braille written in Arabic designing future applications that are highly usable for vi- with single- and double-sided scanned documents. ,ey did sually impaired people. not evaluate their