Speakmytext: A Platform To Support Crowd-Sourced Text-To-Audio Translations

People with little or no reading abilities may not be able to read important information such as: instructions on medicine, warning sign boards, employment/property affidavits, government announcements in emergencies like viral diseases and storm alerts. This reading disability is further compounded when there is no literate around to explain meaning of the displayed information. In this paper, we present SpeakMyText -a platform which facilitates collaboration between reading-illiterates and volunteer literates to promote learning. SpeakMyText's mobile application enables a user to share an image containing text with a volunteer-translator who could then record and share-back its audio translation. The platform is specifically designed for non-literate users with several easy-to-use features like auto-signup; auto-login; multilingual graphical interface, 2-click interface to upload image and other similar features. This paper details its functionality and initial evaluation on a group of 60 reading-illiterates of different age groups and professions. System evaluation reveals promising results; more than 70 % of the non-literate/semi-literate users were able to easily access its basic functionality.