Bahasa Melayu (BM) Screen Reader for Visually Impaired Internet Users

Currently, the Internet usage is rising at a frenzied rate as knowledge and information sharing becomes easy and is time-saving. Regrettably, the visually impaired do not enjoy this liberty and they are facing difficulties in using computer and the Internet to seize any shared and available information. This difficulty is faced especially among the visually impaired Malay language medium Internet user. Specifically, existing screen reader cannot fully cater for users who need to browse the Malay language web pages. The inability of screen reader narration to enunciate Malay words correctly has become a restriction for the visually impaired to acquire any information in the Malay language. Narration of the words are done by non-Malay speakers and the enunciation of those words confuses and at times, do not help users. Thus, this project addresses this issue by investigating the difficulties for visually impaired Internet user to understand what is spoken when using screen readers without a native Malay narrator or speaker. This project aims to reduce the time needed for the visually impaired to understand the information in the Malay language read by the narrator of the screen reader. This project also strives to develop a screen reader prototype, which is able to read in Bahasa Melayu (BM) using local accent. To achieve all the objectives, preliminary interviews and testing session were conducted to collect data to test the hypothesis made. The findings are then will be used as main source of data to develop a prototype of the screen reader. From the built prototype, user testing will be conducted with a sample group of visually impaired to test the functionalities and evaluate the effectiveness of the software. The results and recommendations will be shared by the end of the project as a key milestone for future enhancement.