The Project

Many persons with disabilities such as visual impairment and dyslexia experience reading disabilities and difficulties. These individuals often rely on computer programs such as Kurzweil 3000 or Read Please to read text aloud to them. These computer applications use a text-to-speech converter in order to converse the printed text aloud while highlighting the corresponding text in synchronization with the voice synthesizer.

Current technology, however, limits the usability of such software to a confined PC lab-station; in turn, making the applications importable and inconvenient for everyday use. Nonetheless, with the advancement of portable audio players, such as mp3 players, new innovations can be made in the realm of book reading applications as well.

In an effort to provide a more flexible reading experience for persons with reading disabilities, Michigan State University'sResource Center for Persons with Disabilities sponsored a project to make use of existing portable mp3 player technology to create a portable audio-visual book reader. The objective of Team 2 was to create a portable media player, which would perform the same function as the Kurzweil 3000 software application.

The final product will be an inexpensive, portable mp3 player with an integrated visual display, which will present the printed text in synchronization with mp3 audio. Parameters such as cost, size, and usability will be optimized while maintaining a low power consumption system with high reliability.