Assistive Technologies for the Visually Impaired: A Comprehensive Survey

Abstract

Visual impairment and blindness affects more than 285 million people in the world with significant barriers to education, employment and freedom of movement. Assistive technologies (ATs) play an extremely important role under such issues, transforming both the visual and spatial into a form that can be interpreted and accessed in the form of speech, braille and tactile feedback. A close explanation of five significant areas of technology will be made in this survey, which are Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Text-to-Speech (TTS), Screen Readers, Object Detection, and GPS-based Navigation. We make comparisons between the previous processes and the new innovations based on the deep learning, cloud computing, wearable devices and multimodal interaction. The assistive technologies are categorized as information access systems and mobility and navigation aids, the techniques underlying it, its performance and its trade-offs between its real performance and its budget as well as how the assistive technologies were adopted by its users is discussed. The tendencies in the area precondition the direction of the growth of the utilization of AI-based mobile and wearable solutions, offloading cognition multimodal interfaces, and usercentred design solutions. These have been developed; however, there are such obstacles as inadequate support of the low-resource languages, effective indoor navigation and scalability over time.In future research, there is a need to develop unifying cross platform ecosystems, which can be useful in the day to day life
of the blind and the visually impaired people (BVIP).