Development of Bengali screen reader using Festival speech synthesizer

This paper discusses the development of Bengali screen reader using Festival speech synthesizer. Screen reader is developed with the objective that the visually challenged people can use the computer without any difficulty. The usability of system is checked throughout the development and appropriate modifications are made. Unrestricted Bengali text to speech synthesis (TTS) system which can produce good quality speech in different domains is integrated into the screen reader. Pruning of database is performed to reduce the response time of screen reader. Finally subjective evaluation of screen reader is carried out by the visually challenged people for different applications such as web browsing. Results indicate that the developed system can be used by visually challenged people independently without any external assistance.