• Journal of Internet of Things and Convergence
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.87-92
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• 2023

As times develop, information becomes more diverse and methods of obtaining it become more diverse. About 80% of the amount of information gained in life is acquired through the visual sense. However, visually impaired people have limited ability to interpret visual materials. That's why Braille, a text for the blind, appeared. However, the Braille decoding rate of the blind is only 5%, and as the demand of the blind who want various forms of platforms or materials increases over time, development and product production for the blind are taking place. An example of product production is braille books, which seem to have more disadvantages than advantages, and unlike non-disabled people, it is true that access to information is still very difficult. In this paper, we designed a CNN-based Braille conversion and voice output device to make it easier for visually impaired people to obtain information than conventional methods. The device aims to improve the quality of life by allowing books, text images, or handwritten images that are not made in Braille to be converted into Braille through camera recognition, and designing a function that can be converted into voice according to the needs of the blind.

• Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
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• v.51 no.3
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• pp.1-25
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• 2020

The World Health Organization estimated that more than a billion people (or 15% of the world's population) lives with disabilities. They have the same information needs as non-disabled people. Nevertheless, as the World Blind Union estimated, less than 10% of published books are ever made into accessible formats in developed countries. The role of the national library should be very important to improve the information accessibility for the disabled. Based on this perspective, this study analyzed and compared the history and development, legal basis and organization, main functions and tasks, and service features for the disabled for the Library of Congress of the United States, MTM(Myndigheten för Tillgängliga Medier) of Sweden, National Diet Library of Japan, and SALB (South African Library for the Blind) of Republic of South Africa representing the nationwide disability services by continent. And based on the results of the analysis, this study suggested ways to strengthen the capacity of the National Library for the Disabled of Korea.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2012.10a
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• pp.289-292
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• 2012

Presently, there is the blind of about 20~300,00 people including didn't register in Korea Usually, they used white stick when they walk outside. There is the blind receiving the help of the guide dog but a small number of blind uses due to many composite problems including the cost problem, and etc. Presently, the guidance service aid long for the blind which is commonly used adheres the RFID tag to the white stick. It remains at the level of the extent of making the cover block and RF communication by using this. The recognition distance is short. This is the actual condition in which it is difficult to determine the location of the clear obstacle and size and form, it doesn't become the help which is actually big in the walk of the blinds. Thus, in this paper, the investigation of 'Smart Portable Navigation System' development of the Cortex-A8 Platform base tries to be handled so that the blinds can walk easily.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.217-225
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• 2013

This paper describes the design and implementation of the kWebAnywhere system based on WebAnywhere, which assists people with severely diminished eye sight and the blind people to access Internet information through Web interfaces. The WebAnywhere is a server-based web reader which reads aloud the web contents using TTS(text-to-speech) technology on the Internet without installing any software on the client's system. The system can be used in general web browsers using a built-in audio function, for blind users who are unable to afford to use a screen reader and for web developers to design web accessibility. However, the WebAnywhere is limited to supporting only a single language and cannot be applied to Korean web contents directly. Thus, in this paper, we modified the WebAnywhere to serve multiple language contents written in both English and Korean texts. The modified WebAnywhere system is called kWebAnywhere to differentiate it with the original system. The kWebAnywhere system is modified to support the Korean TTS system, VoiceText$^{TM}$, and to include user interface to control the parameters of the TTS system. Because the VoiceText$^{TM}$ system does not support the Festival API used in the WebAnywhere, we developed the Festival Wrapper to transform the VoiceText$^{TM}$'s private APIs to the Festival APIs in order to communicate with the WebAnywhere engine. We expect that the developed system can help people with severely diminished eye sight and the blind people to access the internet contents easily.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.78-86
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• 2017

The Internet of Things can offer disabled people the assistance and support, which is essential to achieve a good quality of life. The visually impaired people need assistance in finding locations, detecting obstacles on the way, and getting directions while moving around to reach their destination. Based on this persistent need, this paper proposes a navigation system for blind people using Internet of Things. The technologies used in our proposed system are: a smart cane containing an RFID reader and an ultrasonic sensor, a smart phone and Internet. The sensed data from the ultrasonic sensor for detecting obstacle is converted to International Standard format from ISO/IEC 23005-5 (MPEG-V Part 5). The system detects the blind person's location using the RFID tags implemented on the way. The system uses voice message in the smart phone to communicate with the blind person to lead him to his destination. The proposed system has been tested to navigate successfully in the campus.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.19 no.11
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• pp.1837-1851
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• 2016

Newspaper reader mobile applications using text-to-speech (TTS) function enable blind people to read newspaper contents. But, tables cannot be easily read by the reader program because most of the tables are stored as images in the contents. Even though we try to use OCR (Optical character reader) programs to recognize letters from the table images, it cannot be simply applied to the table reading function because the table structure is unknown to the readers. Therefore, identification of exact location of each table cell that contains the text of the table is required beforehand. In this paper, we propose an efficient image processing algorithm to recognize all the cells in tables by identifying columns and rows in table images. From the cell location data provided by the table column and row identification algorithm, we can generate table structure information and table reading scenarios. Our experimental results with table images found commonly in newspapers show that our cell identification approach has 100% accuracy for simple black and white table images and about 99.7% accuracy for colored and complicated tables.

• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.260-271
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• 2020

Smartphones provide blind users with screenreader as an accessibility tool. However, blind users often experience difficulties accessing online shopping malls via smartphones due to their inconsistent and image-based layouts. To enable screenreader users to get access to the detailed information about products while they are shopping online, we have developed BarrierFreeShop, an accessible mobile shopping application for people with visual impairments. BarrierFreeShop has three accessibility features: (1) layout automation, (2) review summarization, and (3) optical character recognition. We conducted a user study with 80 participants with visual impairments where they were asked to use BarrierFreeShop for a month. The findings revealed the effectiveness of our app in terms of speed and post interview feedback. We have also discovered typical shopping experiences that participants had during the test. This research suggests that computer vision technologies can improve accessibility issues in online shopping malls. In addition, we have confirmed that extracting contents from images help people with visual impairments to get better access to product information.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.43 no.6 s.312
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• pp.9-15
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• 2006

The recent development in robot field shows that service robot which interacts with human and provides specific service to human has been researched continually. Especially, robot for human welfare becomes the center of public concern. At present time, guide robot is priority field of general welfare robot and helps the blind keep safe path when he walks outdoor. In this paper, guide robot provides not only collision avoidance but also the best walking direction and velocity to blind people while recognizing environment information from various kinds of sensors. In addition, it is able to provide the most safe path planing on behalf of blind people.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2011.11a
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• pp.1174-1176
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• 2011

Unfortunately, the number of blind people increases every 5 seconds in our world. An extensive research was made on improving the conventional walking cane and developing a microcontroller based walking stick for the blind with sensors and a feedback in form of vibration. Two different kinds of sensors are used to detect obstacles, ultrasonic and infrared distance sensors. The signal from an ultrasonic sensor is fed to a microcontroller. With the help of the supporting software, the Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) principle is extensively used to form three zones and run the corresponding vibration motor at different spends according to how far the detected object is located. The other infrared distance sensors are connected to amplifiers and after that to their corresponding vibration motors through motor drivers. The vibration motors are to be located around the user's arm to notify the blind of the obstacles in the intended walking way. It can be very reliable and sufficient device guiding the blind other than the conventional walking cane which has many drawbacks which will be explained and discussed.

• Convergence Security Journal
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.93-99
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• 2019

In the Republic From the national interest in the recent hiring scandals in the public institutions such as the Financial Supervisory Service, Gangwon Land, and so on, people were outraged by the fact that the competition opportunities were not secured although they should be equally secured to compete with anyone with their capabilities in the fair process. Hence, the government made the public institutions blind hiring to be mandatory, which eliminated writing the academic background, GPA, and English score in the application form and selected the new employees only with job competencies in the public institutions in 2017. In 2018, the prosecution did their best for the investigation on hiring scandal with the strong will to cut the scandal upon announcement of 5-year anti-corruption master plan. Amid this controversy, this study tries to suggest the further direction in the hiring military human resources upon introduction of blind hiring system, reviewing the needs to introduce blind hiring system in the military, the governmental guideline according to the mandatory blind hiring in the public institutions, and the application status of modified blind hiring in the military.