MULTLILIGUAL SELF-VOICING BROWSER MODEL FOR ETHIOPC SCRIPTS Mintesinot Fikre A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES OF THE ADDIS ABABA UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTERS OF SCIENCE IN COMPUTER SCIENCE April 17, 2014 ADDIS ABABA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES COLLEGE OF NATURAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE MULTLILIGUAL SELF-VOICING BROWSER MODEL FOR ETHIOPC SCRIPTS Mintesinot Fikre ADVISOR: Mulugeta Libsie (PhD) APPROVED BY EXAMINING BOARD: 1. Dr. Mulugeta Libsie, Advisor ______________________ 2. Dr. Fekade Getahun, Examiner ______________________ 3. Ashenafi Kassahun, Chair Person ______________________ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank God for making every step of my way to be smoother and safe. If it has not been from him, I would have not been here. It is difficult to overstate my deepest gratitude to my advisor Dr. Mulugeta Libsie. He always make me feel easy when I leave his office after having a discussion on my progress. With his enthusiasm, inspiration, and great efforts to explain things clearly and simply, he helped to make thesis fun for me. Throughout my thesis writing period, he provided encouragement, sound advice, good teaching, good company, and lots of good ideas. I would also like to thank Dr. Fekade Getahun for being instrumental in shaping my ideas and helping me articulate the thesis work to come out as a worthy one. I am indebted to my fellow classmates and friends for making my class time an easy and memorable one. I am thankful to my team work members during class time “ቴዲ” and “ዮኒ”, I have learned a lot both academically and from your friendship. ሽሜ (አበባው አበባው አበባው…) you are great, kind, and off course very funny friend, your encouragement and technical advice was a great help. Lastly, and most importantly, I wish to thank my mom “ጥርዬ” and my sister “ሴሪ”. Your prayer, support, and encouragement indeed is fruitful. My dad, I wish you were here today to see your advice and guidance came true you thought me to pursue in academics during my childhood ages, I kept your word! To them I dedicate this thesis. TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................................................. v ACRONYMS ..................................................................................................................................... vi ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... viii CHAPTER ONE-INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 1 1.1 General Background ............................................................................................................ 1 1.2 Statement of the Problem ..................................................................................................... 2 1.3 Motivation ............................................................................................................................ 2 1.4 Objective .............................................................................................................................. 4 1.5 Scope and Limitations.......................................................................................................... 5 1.6 Research Methodology ........................................................................................................ 5 1.7 Application of Results.......................................................................................................... 6 1.8 Thesis Organization ............................................................................................................. 6 CHAPTER TWO-LITERATURE OVERVIEW..................................................................................... 8 2.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 8 2.2 Adaptive Technology ......................................................................................................... 17 2.2.1 Screen Reader ................................................................................................................. 17 2.2.2 Braille Printer ................................................................................................................. 21 2.2.3 Reading Devices/Scanners ............................................................................................. 21 2.2.4 Braille Display................................................................................................................ 22 2.2.5 Text Magnification ......................................................................................................... 22 2.2.6 Self-Voicing Application ............................................................................................... 22 2.3 Self-Voicing Browsers ....................................................................................................... 23 i 2.4 Text To Speech (TTS) for Amharic and Ethiopic Scripts ................................................. 26 2.5 Summary ............................................................................................................................ 28 CHAPTER THREE-RELATED WORK ................................................................................................ 29 3.1 Web Tree ............................................................................................................................ 29 3.2 WebbIE .............................................................................................................................. 30 3.3 Capti ................................................................................................................................... 32 3.4 HearSay .............................................................................................................................. 33 3.5 WebAnywhere ................................................................................................................... 34 3.6 Summary ............................................................................................................................ 35 CHAPTER FOUR-Design of Multilingual Self-Voicing Browser Model for Ethiopic Scripts ... 36 4.1 Model Overview ................................................................................................................ 36 4.2 User Interface ..................................................................................................................... 37 4.3 Audio Player ...................................................................................................................... 38 4.4 HTML Purifier ................................................................................................................... 38 4.5 Language Identification ..................................................................................................... 39 4.6 Parser Engine ..................................................................................................................... 39 4.7 Text Transcoder ................................................................................................................. 41 4.8 Converted IPA Webpage ................................................................................................... 42 4.9 Text-To-Speech.................................................................................................................. 42 4.10 Language Selection ............................................................................................................ 43 4.11 Language Base ................................................................................................................... 43 4.12 Summary ............................................................................................................................ 43 CHAPTER FIVE-Implementation of Multilingual Self-Voicing Browser Model for Ethiopic Scripts ........................................................................................................................................... 45 ii 5.1 Implementation Environment ............................................................................................ 45 5.2 User Interface ..................................................................................................................... 45 5.3 HTML Purifier ................................................................................................................... 47 5.4 Parser.................................................................................................................................. 54 5.5 Text Transcoder ................................................................................................................. 58 5.6 Summary ............................................................................................................................ 60 CHAPTER SIX-EVALUATION AND TESTING ..................................................................................... 62 6.1 Webpage Preparation ......................................................................................................... 62 6.2 Evaluation Criteria ............................................................................................................. 63 6.3 A-Checker and FAE Test ..................................................................................................