Screen Access For All (SAFA)

A screen reading software for the visually impaired

From the day of dawn of the computer technology, it has affected the lives of millions of people, including the lives of visually challenged persons. Advances in synthetic speech have lead to the development of screen reader software, which can capture text from the computer and transform it into the audio form, which is then used by the visually impaired persons or person with low vision.

This technology has provided innumerous opportunities to the visually impaired persons including the jobs as programmers, call centers, venturing in to new fields such as science & math, and others.

Although screen-reading technology has provided such a power to the visually impaired persons, it has hardly reached to the broader population in India & has remained limited to a small fortunate English-speaking minority.

The major issue with this category of assistive technology is that most products are extremely expensive and are beyond the reach of visually impaired persons at least in developing countries.

Media Lab Asia & NAB Delhi have jointly developed the screen reading software named SAFA. This is an open source software & supports many Indian languages. It is being provided free of charge by NAB Delhi. The users have the option of purchasing additional Text To Speech softwares for better synthetic voice output from SAFA.

SAFA can detect the text language on the fly and calls the relevant TTS for speaking it. So now one can have a multilingual document and read it with SAFA at one go without having to change or install TTS again & again. The latest version of SAFA is supporting the following languages.

• Hindi
• English
• Sanskrit
• Tamil
• Marathi
• Bengali
• Nepali
• Gujarati
• kannada
• Telugu

To add to this list, the developers have made it very easy to add any new language in SAFA whether Indian or foreign. As & when SAPI 5 compliant TTS becomes available for any new language such as Sinhala, all that will be required to do is some changes in the SAFA configuration file and after that SAFA will start supporting that language with speech. This kind of configuration can be done by the user itself. SAFA is being developed & refined continuously as per the features wish list & feedback received from users.

Further developments

The upcoming version of SAFA will include text input using Brailler keyboard layout that is it will be possible to type with just those 6 keys. SAFA is also targeting to solve the problems faced by users due to widespread use of non-standard fonts in Indian languages. Very often, text written in one particular font does not get converted to Unicode based fonts and as such it is not possible to read that text with speech. A font converter will soon be included in SAFA & it will convert a host of fonts into Unicode based fonts.

Download

The user can download the latest version of SAFA and can contact to NAB Helpline if he face any problem during the instillation or while using the SAFA

for more detail Contact Us:
Assistive Technology Helpline
National Association for the Blind
Sector-V, R.K. Puram
New Delhi-110022
Phone:64 55 6968 26 10 2944,Ext-117, 119, 770
Fax: 91-11-26187650
E-mail:info@nabdelhi.org
helpline@nabdelhi.org