‘Intel Acat’ Assistive Platform for Arabic Speaking Disabled People: a Complete Integration

BACKGROUND: The Intel Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT) is the highly configurable platform used by Dr. Stephen Hawking to communicate with his environment. After being released freely to the public, we, at the Embedded Systems Laboratory - UBMA, have been working on integrating the Arabic language on the different packages of the platform in order to make it accessible for disabled people from Arabic countries and decrease their communication limitations. OBJECTIVE: This subproject concerns the Arabic Text-to-speech engine implementation and comes as a final step toward the full integration of the Arabic language into Intel ACAT assistive platform. METHODS: The text to speech conversions was integrated by implementing a mapping between the Arabic words and their phonetic spelling using Microsoft Text-To-Speech Synthesis on Intel ACAT modules and extensions. A full compilation was then executed and tested gathering all the modules and the features of the platform. RESULTS: Over this final integration step (which is freely accessible and open sourced for the public), people with severe disabilities from Arabic-speaking countries will have fully access to all the features of the ACAT platform and will be able communicate and interact easily with their computers. CONCLUSION: The Arabic language Text-to-speech engine integration on ‘Intel ACAT’ Assistive Platform is the final milestone of our project toward making the platform fully accessible for Arabic-Speaking users and comes after our previous integrations of the Arabic language into the keyboard, the intelligent predictive text engine and all panels and interfaces of the platform.