Software Architecture for Better Text-Based Infromation Accessibility

The paper suggests a software architecture to improve the accessibility to information from texts. This software combines techniques like: Image Processing, Optical Character Recognition, Machine Translation, Text Analyze and Text to Speech. The application uses a scanner or a web cam as an image input device, recognizes the text by using OCR, enables text translation by using Google’s machine translation implementation, interpret the text as a future development and reads the text by using TTS technology. In this way the user can put the text information source into a scanner or under a web cam and can hear the text translated and interpreted, if required. A functional prototype is presented and conclusions are issued.