Indian Language Screen Readers and Syllable Based Festival Text-to-Speech Synthesis System

This paper describes the integration of commonly used screen readers, namely, NVDA [NVDA 2011] and ORCA [ORCA 2011] with Text to Speech (TTS) systems for Indian languages. A participatory design approach was followed in the development of the integrated system to ensure that the expectations of visually challenged people are met. Given that India is a multilingual country (22 official languages), a uniform framework for an integrated text-to-speech synthesis systems with screen readers across six Indian languages are developed, which can be easily extended to other languages as well. Since Indian languages are syllable centred, syllable-based concatenative speech synthesizers are built. This paper describes the development and evaluation of syllable-based Indian language Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis system (around festival TTS) with ORCA and NVDA, for Linux and Windows environments respectively. TTS systems for six Indian Languages, namely, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, Malayalam and Telugu were built. Usability studies of the screen readers were performed. The system usability was evaluated by a group of visually challenged people based on a questionnaire provided to them. And a Mean Opinion Score(MoS) of 62.27% was achieved.