Pen-based Japanese character input system for blind persons

摘要

We have developed an on-line character input system using handwritten character recognition technology for blind persons (particularly persons with acquired blindness). A blind user of this system is able to directly input Japanese characters using a stylus-pen instead of a keyboard. We have also confirmed that a novice blind user is able to send an e-mail using our proposed system without well training. However, since many characters having a small number of strokes (such as Hiragana and Katakana) is contained in the mail documents, the character recognition accuracy is significantly decreased in the system. Therefore we propose an improvement method of the recognition accuracy by combining the voting method with our original recognition method and two conventional methods. In addition, a phrase unit order recognition method based on a tri-gram probable language model is added to the system. This improvement recognition system is installed on a PDA with voice synthesizer software. We have addressed the issue of using the proposed PDA to use in sending, receiving and managing user's electronic mail document by wireless LAN.