Christophe Ponsard, Ravi Ramdoyal, Daniel Dziamski, An OCR-enabled Digital Comic Books Viewer, Int. Conf. on Computer Helping People with Special Needs (ICCHP’12), Linz (Austria), 11-13 July 2012 (accepted)
The generalisation of user-friendly and mobile interfaces like
smart phones, eBook readers and tablets has accelerated the transition of
comic books to the digital format. Although such user interfaces are not
always -t for use by people with special needs, the underlying platform
o-ers a large number of innovative services which opens a wide spectrum
of new possibilities for enhancing accessibility.
This paper explores how these new technologies can improve the digital
access to comic books. Our main contribution is the inclusion of optical
character recognition within text bubble associated to comics characters.
The recognised text can then be fed into a text-to-speech engine for an
improved experience. We also details performance improvements of other
functionalities such as the panel order detection and special backgrounds.
Finally, we discuss how these application speci-c adaptations can be
applied to other contexts and which kind of future deployment can be
anticipated.