A System to Normalize Sinhala Characters in Sinhala Braille Translator

Abstract

“The power of the literacy lies not just in the ability to read and write but, rather in a person’s capacity to apply these skills to effectively connect, interpret and discern the intricacies of the word which they live in” Literacy is a fundamental human right. It empowers a person and those people benefit the nation mainly by contributing to the economic growth. Disabled people are not an exception for this powerful tool. The visually impaired people use a special coding system called braille for representing alphabetical characters. This project is based on implementing a system to read braille characters and translate them to a Sinhala text and address the communication gap between the visually impaired community and the sighted, the developed system is capable of extracting Braille characters from a Braille document followed by decoding them into Sinhala characters. The decoded Sinhala characters are further normalized to Sinhala text that is legible for a sighted person. Developing a system to normalize the Sinhala characters in Sinhala Braille can benefit sighted/non sighted people and banks, offices and printing industry by reducing wrong form filling, miss leading and lower the work load and increase the work quality.