Paperboy

Newsreader for people with limited visual capabilities.

Paperboy is a free application by Informatici Senza Frontiere (non-profit organization), working on smartphones,

tablets and PCs offering a simple and fast system allowing visually impaired people to "read" everyday's newspaper, by listening to vocal synthesis, by means of "on demand" news.

There are lots of applications that, by means of vocal synthesis, allow visually impaired people to hear what's happening on the screen. Smartphones, for example, use embedded TTS to read the action associated with the icon the finger of the user is touching. But, which verifications can a blind user have in the case of a touchscreen smartphone?

THE CORNERS!!!

Paperboy is linear and simple. The newspaper has been linearized in a "reverse tree" structure. So, each newspaper is the "root of a tree". If you choose one, then the second level are newspaper's sections. For example, sport, politics, finance... If you decide to enter one section, at the lower level there are the articles of that section.

In order to let you easily browse this "tree", Paperboy screen has been divided into 4 equal parts by virtually cutting the whole area in half, both horizontally and vertically. So, using Paperboy is easy and fast. Keep your phone between your both hands. You need only to tap one of the four areas of Paperboy screen.

Upper left: to go to the parent level (for example from sections to editions or from articles to sections). If you are listening to an article, touch this button shortly to stop the audio. This button is used also to close the app, by pressing it longer;

Upper right: to decrease and read the title of the item of the level you are browsing, whatever it is, edition, section, article.

Lower right: to increase and read the title of the item of the level you are browsing, whatever it is, edition, section, article.

Lower left: to go from an upper level to a lower, for example to go from editions to sections and then to articles. This button activate also the TTS (Text To Speech) synthesis of the article you want to listen to. Press this button longer if you want to listen to Paperboy spoken tutorial.

If you are a web or paper editor and you want to join your newspaper to Paperboy,

write an email to [email protected].