Pen-based PDA system for blind persons

We have developed the pen-based computing system on PDA for blind person. Our system is based on the pen input technology. The user writes down the Japanese character on the input area using the stylus pen. The PDA has two control keys that are located behind the body. They are used for all command operations in the PDA system. When the blind user operates the control key, the voice synthesizer announces the screen information. Therefore the user can recognize the results of input by using the voice. Furthermore, in order to improve the character recognition accuracy we have applied the voting method that has high character recognition accuracy by using three unique recognition algorithms. They consist of our proposed recognition algorithm for the blind person, and two recognition algorithms for the commercial used system. By applying this additional improvement method, the recognition accuracy improved to 97.9% from 66.2%, and we confirmed the validity of this proposed recognition algorithm. We have also developed the E-mail application that used this system on PDA. This is very simple computing operation for blind novice user. Our proposed pen-based PDA system provides easy input for Japanese character in the mobile computing.