Educational System for the Holy Quran and Its Sciences for Blind and Handicapped People Based on Google Speech API

There is a great need to provide educational environments for blind and handicapped people. There are many Islamic websites and applications dedicated to the educational services for the Holy Quran and Its Sciences (Quran Recitations, the interpretations, etc.) on the Internet. Unfortunately, blind and handicapped people could not use these services. These people cannot use the keyboard and the mouse. In addition, the ability to read and write is essential to benefit from these services. In this paper, we present an educational environment that allows these people to take full advantage of the scientific materials. This is done through the interaction with the system using voice commands by speaking directly without the need to write or to use the mouse. Google Speech API is used for the universal speech recognition after a preprocessing and post processing phases to improve the accuracy. For blind people, responses of these commands will be played back through the audio device instead of displaying the text to the screen. The text will be displayed on the screen to help other people make use of the system.

Virtual Learning System (Miqra’ah) for Quran Recitations for Sighted and Blind Students

Quran has ten famous recitations and twenty different narrations. It is well known that the best way is to learn from qualified and authentic scientists (Sheikh's) in one or more of these narrations. Due to 1) the widespread of the Internet and the ease of use and availability of computers and the smart phones that enables access to the Internet;2) the business of people hindering them to attend physical learning environments;and 3) the very few number of elder licensed scientists, we have developed a virtual learning system (Electronic Miqra’ah). Scientists can supervise remotely the registered students. Students (from different ages) can register from anywhere in the world given that they have Internet connection. Students can interact with the scientist in real time so that they can help them memorize (Tahfeez), guide them for error correction, and give them lectures or lessons through virtual learning rooms. The targeted groups of users can be nonblind people, blind people, manual-disabled people and illiterate people. We have developed this system such that it takes the commands via voice in addition to the normal inputs like mouse and keyboard. Users can dictate the commands to the system orally and the system recognizes the spoken phrases and executes them. We have developed an efficient speech recognition engine that is speaker independent and accent independent. The system administrators create several virtual learning rooms and register the licensed scientists. Administrators prepare a daily schedule for each room. Students can register to any of these rooms by pronouncing its name. Each student is allocated a portion of time where he/she can interact directly by voice with the scientist. Other students can listen to the current student’s recitation and the error corrections, guidance or lessons from the scientists.