Project text-to-speech for a blind parent

Question

My first post here. (I sincerely hope it's within the scope of allowed posts I didn't know where else to turn).

I plan to do a project for a ninety-year old mother who is rapidly losing her eyesight and leads a relatively cheerless life.

She sits alone at home watching basic cable and doesn't have an internet connection. She has a huge remote control with 60 tiny buttons and is basically confused by the whole thing.

I just want to put on a hard disk a library of films and/or audiobooks so that she can navigate through them and watch at her leisure.

I've decided she needs a simple joystick with 6 large configurable buttons. I would need to find out some way that titles might be automatically read to her (as she scrolls down prior to selection).

A GUI providing HUGE text on the monitor might suffice...but I believe the text-to-speech feature might be the most difficult problem.

If the titles are read to her, a GUI is almost a moot point.

XBMC, I see, has some text-to-speech features...although I cannot determine whether it would be something that would require her sight to navigate through the interface to "get to" the content. (Further, I cannot determine whether the menu itself is read by the gui--allowing for "sightless" navigation)

I need a GUI to open with a list immediatey upon booting (through which she can simply scroll and select content).

My simple question is whether it is possible with the PI and whether it seems like this is an achievable goal.

On the off-chance that someone could point me in the right direction, I would endlessly appreciate it.

Many thanks.

Answer 1

I am not sure how to make the gui, but I know how to do text-to-speech. You can use espeak:

sudo apt-get install espeak
espeak 'Hello world'

By default, espeak's voice is hard to understand (for me). To find a voice, use:

sudo apt-cache search espeak

Then, find a voice. Install it. Then, run

man espeak

to find how to change the voice. It should be simple.

Here is an example of something I made using espeak: https://github.com/Merlin04/robotthingy

Edit: I think you could make a GUI with Kivy. It uses python.

Answer 2

I only have limited experience with XBMC but strongly believe that that might already be over-complicated for 'the target audience' (this 90-year old woman).

However, I believe that this project is most certainly achievable on a RasPi. As I'm a webdeveloper I would suggest to build a simple webapp. I have no clue whatsoever if something like this exists, but I can't imagine it to be too hard to develop.

Basic idea:

1. RasPi with Raspbian.
2. Webapp running apache.
3. Some backend (PHP for example) indexes the files on the hard disk, formats the name to some readable format and outputs them as a list.
4. Use javascript to control the joystick-input and make the titles of movies/books be read with the HTML5 Speech Synthesis API (example: http://creative-punch.net/2014/10/intro-html5-speech-synthesis-api/).
5. On selection of a movie/book, simply open the file in the browser. (This way you won't have to open a new window so she can just return to the menu by pressing the back button.)

Answer 3

I have done some light digging for you since most things can become overly complex fairly quickly for your target audience.

From my personal experience, buttons and gui's (no matter how simple in your dev eyes) can come across as confusing to the elderly.

I don't know how good your skills are with (web) development, or if you can get a skilled dev motivated to help you achieve your goals, but simplicity to the end user is key here.

There fore "The One Button Audiobook Player" might be what you are looking for. Or maybe an adaptation to it.

extract below:

It basically consists of:

1 Raspberry Pi
1 ModMyPi enclosure
1 button
2 resistors (330 Ohm, 10 Kilo-Ohm)
1 blue LED
1 (slow) 8GB SD-Card
some wire
a pair of speakers

The following software has been used:

Raspbian minimal image (http://www.linuxsystems.it/2012/06/raspbian-wheezy-armhf-raspberry-pi-minimal-image)
mpd (music player daemon)
mpc
mpd-python
pyudev (for USB access)
a self-written python script

The features are the following:

• always on: When you power on the raspberry, it will boot up and start the python script with the audio book in pause

• one button usage: The button pauses and unpauses the audio book or goes back one track when you press the button longer than 4 seconds

• remembers position: It will always remember the last played position

• only one audiobook: There will always be only one audio book on the Raspberry

• easy audio book deployment: When you plug in a USB thumb drive with a special name/label, the Raspberry will stop playing, mount the thumb drive, deletes the old audio book, copies the new one, rebuilds the playlist and – after unplugging the thumb drive – starts the new audiobook in pause mode

• multi format: Since it uses mpd, the player supports Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, OggFLAC, MP2, MP3, MP4/AAC, MOD, Musepack and wave

>>> source <<< --- all credit goes there!

github link