Voice Based Search Engine for Visually Impaired People

World Wide Web is rapidly emerging as the universal information source for our society and it is accessible using a web-browsing package from a networked computer. The design of information on the web is visually oriented. This approach is not always practical, especially for the visually impaired persons. The focus of this project is to develop a prototype which supports web browsing using a speech-based interface. Audio icons are built into the prototype so that users can have better understanding of the original structure/intent of a web page. Voice browsers allow people to access the Web using speech synthesis, pre-recorded audio, and speech recognition. Voice may also be offered as an adjunct to conventional desktop browsers with high resolution graphical displays, providing an accessible alternative to using the keyboard or screen, for instance in automobiles where hands/eyes free operation is essential. The browser will have an integrated text extraction engine that inspects the content of the page to construct a structured representation. This helps in easy and flexible navigation of the page so as to rapidly home into objects of interest.