Public Funding for Iansyst Limited

People with reading difficulties need text in a different format from the original. An accessible format may have a larger or different font, different foreground and background colours, or audio. Busy people with no reading problem may also like to listen to text whilst commuting or at recreation. There are now many tools to convert documents to a different accessible format. Our separate MyDocStore project makes this process easy using the Cloud to automatically convert and move a document from its original to a preferred format on different devices. However, the quality of these conversions and the experience of using them on different devices are both poor. The user needs to be highly motivated (eg because of significant reading problems) to put up with the inconveniences, errors and poor intelligibility of the converted audio file. RoboJean’s (RJ) object is to improve the quality of conversion and the reading experience such that someone using alternative formats will extract as much enjoyment and information from the text as a fluent reader of the original. RJ deals with four barriers to a quality reading experience, which are particularly important using audio and on small screens. It seeks to: 1) infer the structure of a text from an unstructured visual representation. 2) help Text to Speech (TTS) render the text correctly and intelligibly. 3) improve control of reading, particularly audio, and particularly on small devices. 4) allow the reader to annotate, change and then convert text back to its original format, so that it is in a format acceptable to the original owner. Although needing separate technical advances, these four issues are clearly linked. To improve TTS rendering or to control audio streams better or to reverse a conversion you must know the underlying structure. If RJ is successful, reading impaired people will be less disadvantaged, have more pleasure in learning and reading and be able to enjoy high quality alternative formats cheaply.