Abstract
The authors are proposing a cost-effective solution to realize talking appliances for visually-impaired people by utilizing a text-to-speech functionality of their cell-phones. This paper employed an infrared communication as a physical layer and realized an embedded communication module on an 8bit microcontroller. A proposal of UI description language also reduced development cost of UI software for cell-phones. A compliant appliance built from a commercial appliance showed that the additional cost required for newly designed appliance will be less than $0.6 for white appliances or less than $2.0 for information appliances. The cell-phone based solution is also applicable for speech recognition of various appliances.
