Robobraille - A Pan European Email Agent for Braille and Text-to-Speech Translation

RoboBraille is an email-based translation service capable of translating email attachments, e.g. Word documents, text files, HTML pages to and from contracted Braille and to synthetic speech. The eTEN RoboBraille market validation project aims to validate the commercial viability and user acceptance of the Danish RoboBraille translation service in five additional European countries: Ireland, United Kingdom, Italy, Portugal and Cyprus.

As society becomes increasingly dependent on literacy, the problem of textual information inaccessible to print impaired people is likely to grow. The RoboBraille service attempts to resolve this universal problem as it makes textual information accessible to people who would otherwise find it inaccessible due to disability or reading difficulties: the blind, partially sighed, dyslexic and others who find it difficult to read.

During the eTEN RoboBraille project, the RoboBraille service will be adapted into four additional languages (Braille and text-to-speech support for British English, Italian, Greek and Portuguese) before running pilots in each of the countries with a combined target of 900 sample users. The pilot phase is divided into two parts, and the consortium will use the results from the first part as well as any feedback from the midterm workshop to further adapt the service to meet the needs of the users.

Thus, the objectives of the market validation project are:

• to analyse the market possibilities for the RoboBraille service in the 6 partner countries,
• to run pilot tests on the RoboBraille service with some 900 users from the 5 new partner countries,
• to prepare a business plan/deployment report on the conditions for initial deployment of the service and thereby enable and encourage initial deployment of the service.