We propose a pen-based notepad system on PDA (Personal Digital Assistance) as the ubiquitous information device for visually impaired person (particularly persons with acquired blindness). A blind user of this system is able to input Japanese characters directly instead of a keyboard without training. The system can recognize 3,126 characters including US Level 1 characters. This paper describes system design concept of our developed pen-based notepad system on PDA for blind person. We also investigate an improvement method of the recognition accuracy based on a Bi-gram probabilistic language model, and voice assistance function for blind person. The screen information is given to the user via built-in voice synthesizer in this system. From the comparison of our previous recognition method, the recognition accuracy of the 1st candidate has been improved to 84.7 % from 60.2 % in the proposed recognition system with applying the additional error correction method on PDA. Consequently, we confirmed the practical use possibility of the proposed system.
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