Audiopedia

Audiopedia is a program which enables the blind to access Wikipedia through voice. Users navigate articles and the website itself by speaking commands into a microphone. The program then speaks the text of articles and menus to the user. Audiopedia is tailor designed for Wikipedia's unique structure, giving the blind full access to the wealth of information it contains.

Modular Design

Audiopedia has a modular design that incorporates multiple open source libraries. The four main parts consist of a Sphinx4, a speech recognition library; FreeTTS, a voice synthesis library; a module for directly interacting with Wikipedia and a module to facilitate the movement of data and tie the others together. The Wikipedia interaction module makes use of the Wikimedia API to process and communicate the article to the user.

Reading An Article

Audiopedia takes advantage of the underlying structure of Wikipedia to allow the user to access an article in a similar fashion to a sighted user. In this case users can take advantage of the table of contents to quickly access the information they want.

Article Processing

Each article is processed in full when it is first loaded. This means the program has divided the article into usable pieces that it can simply communicate to the user when the time comes. Though this means a slightly longer load time when the article is first accessed, by processing it in full the program can then quickly make any part of the article available to the user.