Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
68 results found tagged text-to-speech.
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Loudmouth: Modifying Text-to-Speech Synthesis in Noise
This short paper from Northeastern University presents Loudmouth, a modified text-to-speech synthesizer that emulates the Lombard effect — the natural way humans adjust their speech in noisy environments — to improve synthesized speech intelligibilit…
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Sparsha: A Comprehensive Indian Language Toolset for the Blind
This paper presents Sparsha ("feeling of touch" in Hindi), the first comprehensive toolset enabling over 13 million visually impaired people in the Indian subcontinent to read and write in their native languages using a computer. Existing Braille tra…
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A System for Creating Personalized Synthetic Voices
This paper presents the ModelTalker Voice Creation System, a tool that enables individuals to create personalized synthetic voices with unrestricted vocabulary for use in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices. The system addresses …
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Design and Development of an Indoor Navigation and Object Identification System for the Blind
This paper presents a multi-sensor orientation assistant for blind users navigating unknown indoor environments. The system addresses three core problems identified by blind users: determining one's position, determining head direction and movement d…
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Older Adults' Evaluations of Speech Output
This paper investigates older adults' subjective evaluations of different speech output voices in the context of an Intelligent Home System (IHS) designed to help older people live independently. Given that 66% of people with visual impairments in th…
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User Interface of a Home Page Reader
This paper from IBM Japan's Tokyo Research Laboratory describes the design and evaluation of Home Page Reader, one of the earliest dedicated web browsers for blind users, which became an IBM Japan product in October 1997. The paper opens by framing t…
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Improving the Usability of Speech-Based Interfaces for Blind Users
This paper from the University of York examines the usability problems inherent in speech-based interfaces for blind computer users and presents a study comparing how blind and sighted subjects process information delivered through synthetic speech. …
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Emacspeak — Direct Speech Access
This paper by T. V. Raman (then at Adobe Systems, developed while at Digital Equipment Corporation's Cambridge Research Lab) presents Emacspeak, a speech output subsystem for Emacs that provides what the author terms "direct speech access" to UNIX wo…
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Evaluating Prosodic Cues as a Means to Disambiguate Algebraic Expressions: An Empirical Study
This paper investigates whether inserting pauses into text-to-speech renderings of mathematical expressions can help listeners distinguish between structurally different but verbally similar algebraic expressions. The core problem is that written mat…
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Are Synthesized Video Descriptions Acceptable?
This paper from IBM Research Tokyo and WGBH National Center for Accessible Media investigates whether text-to-speech (TTS) synthesised narrations are an acceptable alternative to human-narrated audio descriptions for online videos. While accessibilit…