“BOON TO BLIND” USING “JAWS” SOFTWARE

an ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE application

flat surface. The display sits under the computer
keyboard.

ABSTRACT:
The first part of this paper introduces the necessity of
refreshable Braille display, device which rests on the
It is used to present text to computer users who are blind
keyboard by means of raising dots through holes on a flat
and cannot use a normal computer monitor. Speech
surface .The second part focuses on the fundamentals of
synthesizers are also commonly used for the same task,
the speech synthesis which converts text to speech, and the
and a blind user may switch between the two systems
speech units. The third part portrays the speech production
depending on circumstances .Because of the complexity
by the vocal chords and acoustic phonetics. The next part is
of producing a reliable display that will cope with daily
dealt with the detailed description on various converted
wear and tear, these displays are expensive. Usually, only
speech units
40 or 80 Braille cells are displayed. Models with 18-40
(words,sylablles,demisylablles,diphone,allophone,phone
cells exist in some note taker devices.On some models the
me), the way in which these primitive speech units are
position of the cursor is represented by vibrating the dots,
combined to form a full speech with phonetic sounds . The
and some models have a switch associated with each cell
process indulged in the analysis of speech signals and the
to move the cursor to that cell directly.The mechanism
various synthesis methods, the coding of vocal tract
which raises the dots uses the piezo effect: Some crystals
parameters using Linear Predictive Coding (LPC)
expand, when a voltage is applied to them. Such a crystal
synthesis with its block diagram
is connected to a lever, which in turn raises the dot. There
and finally the conclusion part ,followed by bibliography
has to be such a crystal for each dot of the display, i.e
eight per character.
INDEX
• Introduction The software, that controls the display is called a
• Why JAWS screen reader. It gathers the content of the screen from the
• Fundamentals of speech synthesis operating system, converts it into braille characters and sends it

• Speech units to the display. Screen readers for graphical operation systems are

• Speech production and Acoustic units
• Synthesis methods
• conclusion
INTRODUCTION:-
The refreshable Braille display is an electro-
mechanical device for displaying Braille characters,
usually by means of raising dots through holes in a
especially complex, because graphical elements like windows or
slidebars have to be interpreted and described in text form.A
new development, called the rotating-wheel Braille display, was
developed in 2000 by the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) and is still in the process of
commercialization. Braille dots are put on the edge of a spinning
wheel, which allows the blind user to read continuously with a
stationary finger while the wheel spins at a selected speed. The
Braille dots are set in a simple scanning-style fashion as the dots
on the wheel spins past a stationary actuator that sets the
Braille characters. As a result, manufacturing complexity is
greatly reduced and rotating-wheel Braille displays will be
much more inexpensive than traditional Braille displays.
FUNDAMENTALS OF SPEECH SYNTHESIS:
Speech synthesis is the automatic generation of
speech waveforms based on an input of text to
synthesize and on previously-analyzed digital
speech data. The critical issues for current
speech synthesizers concerns trade-offs among
fig: block diagram of text to speech synthesis
The stored speech units are retrieved and concantenated to
output the synthetic speech. Speech is often modeled as
the response of a time-varying linear filter (corresponding
to the vocal tract from the glottis to the lips) to an
excitation waveform consisting of braoadband noise, a
periodic waveform of pulses, or a combination. In
the conflicting demands of maximising the quality of
speech, while minimising memory space, algorithmic
complexity, and computation speed. A block diagram
of the steps in speech synthesis is shown below. The
text might be entered by keyboard or optical
character recognition or obtained from a stored data
base. Speech synthesizers then convert the text into a
sequence of speech units by the lexical access
routines. Using large speech units, such as phrases
and sentences, can give high quality output speech
but requires much more memory.
summary, the most important components of a
synthesizers algorithm are
1. stored speech units: storage of speech
parameters, obtained from natural speech and
organized in terms of speech units and
 2. Concatenation routines: a program of rules to
concatenate these units, smoothing
parameters to create time trajectories.
Real time speech synthesiser has been available for many
years. Such speech is generally intelligible, but lacks
naturalness. Quality inferior to that of human speech is
usually due to inadequate modelling of three aspects of
human speech production: coarticulation, intonation, and
the vocal-tract excitation. Most synthesisers reproduce speech
bandwidth in the range of 0-3 kHz (e.g. for telephone
applications) or 0-5 kHz (for higher quality). Frequencies
up to 3 kHz are sufficient for vowel perception since
vowels are adequately specified by the first three
formants. The perception of some consonants, however, is
highly impaired if energy in the 3-5 kHz range is omitted.

SPEECH UNITS:

The choices of speech units determine the storage memory required and the quality of the synthetic speech. Some possible units are
described in the following table. The number in the bracket under the column "Quantity" is the sufficient number of the subword units
to describe all English words.

Units Quantity Descriptions Advantages/Disadvantages

Words 300,000 The fundamental units of a sentence. Advantages:
(50,000)  yield high quality speech
 simple concatenation synthesis algorithm

Disadvantages:

 limited by the memory requirement

 concatenation of isolated words will degrade
intelligibility and naturalness of synthetic speech
 need to adjust the duration of word
Syllables 20,000 It consists of a nucleus (either a vowel or diphthong) Disadvantage:
(4400) plus some neighbouring consonants.  syllable boundary is uncertain
Demisyllable 4500 It is obtained by dividing syllables in half, with the cut Advantages:
(2000) during the vowel, where the effects of coarticulation  preserve the transition between adjacent phones
are minimal.  simple smoothing rules
 produce smooth speech
Diphone 1500 It is obtained by dividing a speech waveform into Advantages:
(1200) phone-sized units, with the cuts in the middle of each  preserve the transition beteween adjacent phones
phone.  simple smoothing rulesproduce smooth speech
Allophone 250 They are phonemic variants. Advantage:
 reduce the complexity of the interpolation
algorithm comparing to phonemes
Phonemes 37 It is the fundamental unit of phonology. Advantages:
 memory requirement is small

Disadvantages:

 require complex smoothing rules to represent the

coarticulation effect
 need to adjust intonation at each context
Consider the English word "segmentation". Its representation according to each of the above subword unit sets is:
The vertical lines is the segmentation lines with respect to
the speech units. The diphone unit /s_eh/ is different from
the demisyllable unit /s_eh/ even we use the same
symbols. The segmentation lines give us a picture on how
each speech units related to each other.
SPEECH PRODUCTION AND
ACOUSTIC-PHONETICS:
The English phonemes can be classified according to how
they are produced by the vocal organ. An understanding
of speech production mechanism will help us to analyse
the speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics is the study of the
physics of the speech signal. When sound travels through
the air from the speaker's mouth to the hearer's ear it does
so in the form of vibrations in the air. It is possible to
measure and analyse these vibrations by mathematical
technhiques studied in the physics of sound.
SPEECH UNITS:
The acoustic signals are converted by listener into a
sequence of words and sentences. The most familiar
language units are words. They can be thoughts of as a
sequence of smaller linguistic units, phoneme, which are
the fundamental units of phonology. We will use
ARPABET symbols in the rest of this tutorial.
The easiest way to understand the nature of phonemes is
to consider a group of words like ``hid'', ``head'', ``hood'',
and ``hod''. All these words are made up of an initial, a
middle, and a final element. In our examples, the initial
and final elements are identical, but the middle elements
are different. It is the difference in this middle element
that distinguish the four words. Similarly, we can find
those sounds which differentiate one word from another
for all the words of a language. Such distinguishing
sounds are called phonemes. There are about fifty
phoneme units in English.
A phoneme is not a single sound but a set of sounds
sharing similar characteristics. The elements in the set is
called allophones. Every phoneme consists of several
allophones, i.e., several different ways of pronunciation.
The square brackets are usually used to indicate the
allophonic symbols. For example, pre-vocalic stops have
both a closure phase and a release phase. Stop releases are
classified further as aspirated or unaspirated. Aspiration is
a breathy noise generated as air passes through the
partially closed vocal folds and into the pharynx. The
allophonic symbol [ph] is used to represent a plosive
sound /p/ with an aspiration.
In the study of speech, a phone is a unit at the phonetic
level. There is not always a one-to-one correspondence
between the units at the phonetic level and those at the
phonemic level. For example, the word ``can't'' is
phonemically /k ae n t/ (4 phonemic units), but may be
pronounced [k \~ae t] with the nasal consonant phoneme
absorbed into the preceding vowel as nasalisation (3
phonetic units).
Phoneme can be combined into larger units called
syllables. A syllable ussually consists of a vowels
surrounded by one or more consonants. In English there
Fricative sounds are generated by constricting the vocal
tract at some point along the vocal tract and forcing the
Plosive or stop sounds are resulted from blocking the
vocal tract by closing the lips and nasal cavity, allowing
the air pressure to build up behind the closure, and
are approximately 10,000 syllables. A even larger
linguistic unit is the word, which normally consists of
sequences of several phonemes that combine into one or
more syllables. Words are combined into still longer
linguistic units called sentences. The structure of
sentences is described by the grammar of the language.
Grammar includes phonology, morphology, syntax, and
semantics.
The following figure shows a segment of vowel /ix/. The
quasi-periodicity (almost periodic) of voiced speech can
be observed.
air stream to flow through at a high enough velocity to
produce turbulence. This turbulent air sounds like a hiss
e.g. /hh/ or /s/.
following by a sudden release of it. This mechanism
produces sounds like /p/ and /g/. The following figure
shows the stop /g/. The silence before the burst is the stop
closure.
Affricates is a combination of stop and fricative sounds.
Maner of articulation is concerned with airflow i.e. the
paths it takes and the degree to which it is impeded by
vocal tract constrictions. Stops, fricatives, and affricates
are collectively called obstruent phonemes which are
weak and aperiodic and are primarily excited at their
major vocal tract constriction.
While manner of articulation and voicing partition
phonemes into three broad classes, it is the place of
articulation (point of narrowest vocal tract constriction)
that enables finer discrimination of phonemes. Vowels are
primarily described in terms of tongue position and lip
rounding. The significant places of articulations are the
lips (bilabial), lips and teeth (labio-dental), teeth (dental),
upper gums (alveolar), hard plate (palatal), soft plate
(velar), and glottis (glottal). A table shows the places and
manners of articulation for English consonants can be
found in.ACOUSTIC PHONETICS ANALYSIS OF
SPEECH SIGNALS:
Based on the knowledge of the speech production
mechanism and the study of acoustic phonetics, we are
able to extract a set of features which can best represent a
particular phoneme. One of the popular techniques is the
spectrogram which describe how the frequency contents
of a speech signal change with time.
Suppose we have a signal which is sampled at 16 KHz,
the typical steps to compute the spectrogram are described
as follows. The speech is blocked by Hamming window
with duration of 256 samples and is overlapped by 200
samples. A s56-point FFT (fast Fourier transform) is
applied to each windowed speech. The power spectra in
dB is plotted. The formant frequencies are displayed by
horizontal bars in the spectrogram while the vertical lines
there indicate the pitch period (i.e. the inverse of the
fundamental frequency).
 smooth the transitions but it can yield good
quality speech.
The formant frequency is the resonance frequency of the
o Terminal analog synthesisers (e.g.
vocal tract. The formant frequencies of a vowel are
LPC vocoder) model the speech output of the
determined by the parameters of the vocal tract
vocal tract without explicitly taking account of
configuration such as the length of vocal tract, the
articulator movements. This method generate
position of tongue, and the shape of lips. The first three
lower quality speech but it is more efficient.
formants are the primary cues to recognise English
o Articulatory synthesizer s directly model the
vowels. For unvoiced sounds, such as /hv/ and /jh/ in the
vibrating vocal cords and the movement of
spectrogram, the primary cues for recognition is the
tongue, lips, and other articulators. Due to the
energy distribution along the frequency axis.
difficulty of obtaining accurate three-
dimensional vocal tract representations and of
modeling the system with a limited set of
Synthesis Methods:
parameters, this method has yiwlded lower-
Synthesisers can be classified by how they parameterise quality speech.
the speech for storage and synthesis. o Formant synthesizers use a buzz generator to
simulate the vocal cords and individual formant
o Waveform synthesizers concatenate speech resonators to simulate the acoustic resonaces of
units using stored waveform. This method the vocal tract.
requires large memories and good algorithm to
We will introduce some popular speech synthesis
methods in the following sections.
Linear Predictive Coding Synthesis:

Linear predictive coding (LPC) synthesis is a very
efficient method. All the vocal tract parameters are
represented in a set of LPC coefficients, which are
calculated automatically from the natural speech signals.
The number of
coefficients is typically 10 to 20 i.e. 2 for each formants
in the 4-5 kHz bandwidth of the speech signal, plus a few
for modelling spectral zeros and the source of vocal tract
excitation. Speech synthesis model based on LPC is as
shown as below.

In parametric synthesis, such as LPC, speech units are

divided into short frames (10-30 ms) of samples; the
The LPC synthesis filter is excited by either a periodic
speech signal is analysed through a "time window" to
(typically impulsive) source or a noise source, depending
obtain a spectral representation of the unit.
on whether the analysed speech is estimated to be voiced
Parameterisation of successive frames adequately
or not. The excitation is specified by a gain factor, a
models the speech if the frames are short compared to
voiced/unvoiced (periodicity) bit, and (if voiced) a
vocal tract motion. For each fames, LPC analysis
fundamental frequency value.
produces a set of p real-valued predictor coefficients ak

,which represent an optimal estimate to the spectrum of a typically periodically (every 10-30 ms frame). Often the
frame of speech using poles .Spectral and excitation parameters from succesive frames are linaerly
parameters are fetched from the stored speech units,
interpolated during a frame, to allow more frequenct
updates to the synthesiser.
Formant Synthesisers:
Formant synthesiser employs formant resonances and
bandwidths to represent the stored spectrum. The vocal
tract filter is usually represented by 10-23 spectral
fig: block diag of format synthesizer
The excitation is either a periodic train of impluses (for
voiced speech), pseudo-random noise (for unvoiced
speech), or periodically shaped noise (for voiced
fricatives). These sources are multiplied by a gain (i.e.
voice amplitude, aspiration amplitude, and frication
amplitude) to adjust the amplitude of the synthetic speech.
The vocal tract is usually modelled as a cascade of
resonators. Each representing either a formant or the
spectral shape of the excitation source. A cascade of
resonators are often used for vowel generation.
parameters. Formant synthesisers have an advantage over
LPC systems in that bandwidths can be more easily
manipulated and that zeros can be directly introduced into
the filter. However, locating the popes and zeros
automatically in natural speech is a more difficult task
than automatic LPC analysis. Most of formant
synthesisers use a model similar to that shown below.
A parallel bank of resonators may also be used to
generate both vowels and consonants. Compared with
the cascaded approach, parallel synthesis required
calculation of each formant amplitude as well as an extra
amplitude multiplication per formant in the synthesiser.
Synthesis of nasals usaually require an extra resonator
because the production of nasals including the nasal
cavity and hence the acoustic path of nasals is longer
than for vowels. This increases the number of resonance
in the speech bandwidth.
CONCLUSION:

PRESENTED BY:
Finally ,an effective ,interactive communicative
R.S.V.N.Praveen Kmar (04761a1251).(phone: 9849178896)
medium has been deviced with the glimpse of artificial
Mailid: praveenrsvn@yahoo.co.in
intelligence using the Braille displays. Speaker
S.K.Srinath(04761a1229).
independent speech synthesizers could presume highly
Mailid:bannu5s@gmail.com(phone :9440496675)
sophisticated algorithms,that consume much time and
Lakireddy Balireddy College of Engineering
space complexities

Thus the JAWS persuade the blind people to make use

of computer as usual as a normal man.

BIBLOGRAPHY:

The following websites have been taken for

reference:
1. www.wikipedia.com
2. www.asel.udel.edu