Voice based Email service for visually challenged people

Project Title

Voice based Email service for visually challenged people

Project Area of Specialization Augmented and Virtual RealityProject Summary

We have seen that the inception of Internet has dramatically revolutionized many fields. Internet has made life of people so easy that people today have access to any information they want sitting at their home. One of the main fields that Internet has revolutionized is communication. And talking about communication over Internet, the first thing that comes in our mind is E-mail. E-mails are considered to be the most reliable way of communication over Internet, for sending or receiving some important information. But there is a special criteria for humans to access the Internet and the criteria is you must be able to see. You must be thinking that what sort of criteria is this, every one with eyes can see. But there are also specially abled people in our society who are not gifted with what you have. Yes there are some visually challenged people or blind people who can not see things and thus can not see the computer screen or keyboard. A survey shows that there are more than 250 million visually challenged people around the globe. That is, around 250 million people are unaware of how to use Internet or E-mail. The only way by which a visually impaired person can send an E-mail is, they have to dictate the entire content of the mail to a third person( not visually challenged ) and then the third person will compose the mail and send on the behalf of the visually impaired person. But this is not a correct way to deal with this problem. It is very less likely that every time a visually challenged person can find someone for help. Although for these reasons the specially abled people are criticized by our society. So, for the betterment of society and giving an equal status to such specially abled people we have come up with this project idea which provides the user with ability to send mails using voice commands without the need of keyboard or any other visual things.

Project Objectives

This application proposes an android application, designed specifically for visually impaired people. This application provides a voice based mailing service where they could read and send mail on their own, without any guidance. Here, the users have to use certain keywords which will perform certain actions for e.g. Read, Send, Compose Mail, Address Book etc. The system can be used by a blind person to access mails easily and efficiently. Thus reliance of visually impaired on other people for their activities related to mail can be reduced. 285 million people are estimated to be visually impaired worldwide: 39 million are blind and 246 have low vision. Thus, it turned out to be the moral responsibility to give something back to society and use our technical knowledge to build an application for their benefit. The existing system’s does not provide a complete voice based application leading to lack of privacy and security for a
visually impaired person. So, there emerged a need to create a complete voice based application for such people so that they can send or receive the emails with ease providing security and privacy. Email has turned out to be an important part of formal communication in professional world. For people who can see, emailing is not a big deal, but for people who are not blessed with ability of vision it poses a key concern because of its intersection with many vocational responsibilities. Thus, the system  turns out to be an application through which they can send or receive emails not only easily but securely too.

Project Implementation Method

1) On opening the Application the user can log in
2) On the login page , the user is asked for username and password
3) After logging in, a splash screen will appear and the user will be authenticated with his fingerprint every time
4) On successful authentication, the menu page will open and the user is prompted for input commands which are Compose , Received mails and Send mails. User has to say one of the commands and based on the voice commands, he will directed accordingly.
5) On Compose, the user will be directed to Compose Page and on tap on the screen will be prompted to tell the recipient's ID, subject and message of the email. The mail gets sent successfully to the recipient's ID
6) On Received, the user will be directed to received mails Page and On the tap on the screen, the user will be prompted which mail to read the first, second or third mail. The main aim of VMAIL is to help visually
impaired people to enjoy the benefits of email and should be
self-sufficient in sending and receiving them independently.
Currently we have working module of VMAIL which works
on instructions given specifically in English. For the future
scope we can also design the application working on
other languages.  They found the application more useful as they do not need to remember the position of various keys as it is a voice based application, whereas for using the other
applications via the talkback feature they need to remember
the position of keys.

Benefits of the Project

The key opinion kept into consideration while
developing the proposed system was accessibility. Such
applications will be used efficiently by anyone whether he is
able or disable. Unlike existing systems which focuses more
on GUI friendliness of normal user, our system covers
expectations of both normal as well as visually impaired
group.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

We describe the voicemail system architecture that can be used by a blind person to access e-mails easily and efficiently. The contribution made by this research has enabled the blind people to send and receive voice-based e-mail messages in their native language with the help of a computer or a mobile device. Our proposed system GUI has been evaluated against the GUI of a traditional mail server. We found that our proposed architecture performs much better than that of the existing GUIS. The basic function of the application is to provide user with a simple way to perform email operations on his phone without compromising his security. The application is totally voice-based allowing
blind person to send and receive emails on the go. It
converts the user spoken voice into text and performs the
action accordingly. It consists of voice confirmation i.e.,
confirming if the user has actually spoken the recognized text or not, which minimizes the errors involved. It has
the feature of address book which helps user to save the
email as a contact and use that contact in future for
sending the mail. App Lock is a security module which acts as an authenticator. It is second layer of security which allows only genuine user to access the application. The screen was divided into six equal parts keeping in part blind
people’s convenience. They had to save passcode first
time while logging in by shaking their phone. Then every
time the user signs in to the system, he has to type the
passcode to get access to the application. SQLite
SQLite is a software library that implements a selfcontained,
server-less, zero-configuration, transactional
SQL database engine. It is the default database provided by Android. All the address book contacts along with email addresses resides on user’s phone in SQLite database. The Java Mail API provides a platform-independent and protocol-independent framework to build mail and messaging applications. The Java Mail API provides a set of abstract classes defining objects that comprise a
mail system. It is an optional package (standard
extension) for reading, composing, and sending
electronic messages. 

Final Deliverable of the Project HW/SW integrated systemType of Industry IT Technologies Augmented & Virtual RealitySustainable Development Goals Quality EducationRequired Resources

Item Name	Type	No. of Units	Per Unit Cost (in Rs)	Total (in Rs)
			Total in (Rs)	10000
Requirement	Miscellaneous	3	1000	3000
Design and Coding	Miscellaneous	3	1000	3000
Testing	Miscellaneous	4	1000	4000