Abstract
The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that millions of individuals
worldwide experience visual disabilities, which can have significant
personal implications as more than 80% of our perception, cognition,
learning, and daily activities rely on vision. As a result, people with
visual impairments face challenges in education and professional
settings due to inaccessible technologies. To address this issue, we
introduce a speech-based assistive system that allows visually impaired
and blind individuals to interact with ChatGPT through natural
conversation. The system incorporates automatic speech recognition
(ASR), text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, and a messenger bot (Telegram) to
create a seamless interface to ChatGPT. Through preliminary experiments,
we have demonstrated the potential of this system as an assistive
technology. We have made the source code publicly available at
https://github.com/IS2AI/telegram-bot-chatgpt to encourage the
development of assistive technologies for individuals with visual
impairments.