Privacy-preserving Twitter-based Solution for Visually Impaired People

Visually impaired people is a big community all over the world. They usually seek help to perform their daily activities such as reading the expired date of food cans or medicine, reading out PIN of a certain ATM Visa, identifying the color of clothes or differentiate between the money notes and other objects with the same shape. A number of IT-based solutions have been proposed to help and assist blind and/or visually impaired people. Generally speaking, these solutions, however, do not support Arabic languages nor protect blind users’ privacy. In this paper, Trusted Blind Society (TBS) mobile application is proposed. It is an android application which allows blind users to recognize their unknown surroundings by utilizing two concepts: social networks sites and friendsourcing. These two concepts were employed by allowing family members and the trusted friends, who are registered on Twitter, to answer blind users’ questions on a real time. The solution is also bilingual, supports (Arabic/English) and allows screen reader using Android talk-back service. The performance of the TBS system was evaluated using loader.io to check its stability under the heavy load and it was tested by a number of blind volunteers and the results showed good performance comparing to most related work.

@article{Abdraboo2017,
  title     = {Privacy-preserving Twitter-based Solution for Visually Impaired People},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {8},
  number    = {7},
  year      = {2017},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Dina Ahmed Abdraboo and Tarek Gaber and Mohamed El Sayed Wahed},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2017.080770},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2017.080770}
}