Head of project : Dang Hoai Phuc

“Establishing The library of digital talking book and Vietnamese speech engine software for visually impaired people” project with the total expenses of 59.535 USD has participated in the contest with its topic is “Bright future from present dream – Samsung Digital Hope 2005” organized by Samsung Group (has participations of 7 countries) and won the prize of 44.535 USD to carry out the project from 2005 to the end of 2006.
Establishing The library of digital talking book and Vietnamese speech engine software is a project that developes assistive tool and compatible material helping visually impaired people to access computer effectively and quickly; creates a variable source of material to serve the visually impaired students . It is divided into 2 main parts :

Part 1 : Establishing The library of digital talking book . In this part, the project will proceed transfering all the textbooks into digital talking books in DAISY format. With this kind of books, visually impaired people can both read the Braille book and listen to it, increase or decrease the talking speed, switch among the pages more quickly, looking up the content more easily, mark or notice directly on the book based on the information of each person… Compared to current talking books which is simply talked and recorded into tape, the above functions are not supported. This make visually impaired people difficult to read books and looking for document. Moreover, the digital talking books will help accessing the new set of books many times more quickly. You can visit www.daisy.org for more information about DAISY format.

Part 2 : Project of developing Vietnames speech engine in Sapi standard with new voice. Current voice misses and does not support many words in Vietnamese.
Besides, the project will also integrate the speech engine into some current popular screen reading software including Jaws, NVDA.

With the permission and support from The Publisher of Education, the project has transferred all the textbooks’ content into the digital talking books for visually impaired people in DAISY format, with the total of 85 books from grade 1st to grade 12th. This is a project that concentrate on the education issue for visually impaired people to bring them the abudent source of education that help them integrate into the social life.