Talking Lens

Mr. Ranganathan, Meera's maternal grandfather is a Tamil pundit. He has taught Tamil and few other subjects at school for over thirty years. He also took a large number of tuition classes after school hours, not only to support his meagre income but also to help needy students. He has an avid interest in politics and likes to read a lot. But unfortunately he has lost his eyesight - most of it actually. He can barely recognize people. Reading is close to impossible.

One reason of course is age - he is in his nineties. Apart from that he has another complication. He damaged one of his eyes at a very young age and has been forced to use the power of one eye for most of his working life. That has put lot of strain on the eye and eventually led to the current situation.

Last year when I met him, I realized that I wanted to help him read. One of the ideas that came to my mind that time was to build a "talking lens" - something that he can use to point to a newspaper or book and it will read out the text. This, of course, would be useful for other visually impaired people as well.

Alternatives exist of course -
a. Buy him audio books (expensive ?)
b. Teach him Braille (too old and is there much reading material available widely ?)

Both these don't really solve the newspaper problem. He does watch TV but is not very satified with the quality of the content presented there. His wife could read to him for some time. But she herself is having heart problems and whatever time she gets from doing household chores, she probably wants to take some rest.
All of Mr. Ranganathan's children and grandchildren have their own lives to look after - so they don't have much time to spend with him.

The ascii diagram below depicts the system I have in mind -

 +----------------------+            +----------------------+
 |"Lens" - OCR component|...........>|"Talker" - text2speech|
 +----------------------+            +----------------------+
                                                |
                                                |
                                                |
                                                |
                                                V
                                         +------------+
                                         |Audio Output|
                                         +------------+

While the components like OCR and text2speech are available, the challenge is to build a compact and portable device, just like a normal lens, which does all these
things in an integrated manner. Probably someone has built such a thing - I just have to search better. Support for Indian languages, for both OCR and the text2speech may be another challenge.

Nonetheless, another interesting thing to pursue with some spare time at hand. I wish I could build one of these and give it to Mr. Ranganathan one of these days.