VIMPY — A Yapper for the visually impaired

Traditionally, visually impaired people have had only a limited means of accessing printed material. The accessibility of the huge knowledge bank that is available in the form of printed text is thus very restricted for them. A visually impaired person has two traditional ways of accessing printed data; they are the Braille script and audio tapes. However, even the assistance of these media is not enough and the blind have to rely on the sighted people for mundane reading. This reliance and the higher costs of producing alternative format materials necessarily reduce the material availability. In this work it has been proposed to eradicate the above mentioned hindrance. VIMPY - A Yapper for the Visually Impaired is a reader for the blind that helps reading any printed A4 size physical document. It is a standalone device which uses its own operating system, VimpyOS. An attempt has been made to develop a machine that converts physical documents containing printed text to speech and provides other facilities such as options to save text for later use, customize user experience by altering pitch, volume, speed and also read text files in the Devnagiri script etc.