Design of a talking videotex terminal for the blind

Videotex is an electronic information service which allows the sighted user to access a vast amount of information via the telephone line, to be viewed on the screen of the domestic television receiver in a compact and colourful layout. In this paper, the development of a microprocessor based system for converting videotex pages to synthetic speech in real time, for the benefit of blind people, is described. The system has been successfully used by some blind people to access the British Telecom videotex service (Prestel).