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This paper suggests a standalone Arabic Reading Machine using TTS (Text-to-speech) and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software built in a user friendly way for Visually Impaired People. In the Arab world, the assistive reading technology for visually impaired people use either computer or mobile phone software, which both require the help of another person. The type of reading machines has already been developed for Latin languages and research about it has been very active since the mid 1950's. An important progress has been made, and many reading machines now provide smooth and reliable speech. Although, reading machines are the most visually impaired friendly reading assistive devices, since their hardware is specifically designed for visually impaired people, they are not yet commercialized for Arabic as it requires further work on the integration of two different systems, namely OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and TTS (Text-to-speech) systems. To answer this issue an Arabic standalone reading machine designed specifically for visually impaired people with convenient control is suggested. Also, the system of existing Latin reading machines is analyzed in details, along with existing OCR and TTS software.

Notification is a service which addresses devices and users with messages or applications to be executed immediately or at specific time. Notification is important for delivering emergency, warnings and other timed messages. Recently introduced mobile broadcast is an ideal candidate for notification services due to its constant availability and potential for simultaneous addressing of very large user groups. Mobile devices also have connectivity to non-broadcast networks which allows for extended notification relying on user interaction, bringing its scope to applications requiring a response mechanism, e.g. for voting. In this paper, extensions to include notification service into the data transport system called IP Datacast (IPDC) used in the DVB-H mobile television standard are presented. The notion of notification services is first overviewed and the notification service elements complementing IPDC in DVB-H are described. Next the notification protocols and message formats are defined and the default notification channels are explained. The presented notification system reflects the current standardization status within the DVB and introduces extensions and new functionalities.

In this work, we present a distortion-based erasure code for realizing unequal error protection in video delivery services. Prior to transmission, the resulting distortion caused by packet erasure is estimated for each of the video packets. This Information Is used to protect the video packets with higher distortion values strongly, whereas video packets with very low distortion values are not worth being protected. We present a local search algorithm that delivers near-optimal parity codes which minimize the expected overall distortion at the receiver. Furthermore, we suggest the deployment of our FEC erasure code at video proxies located at the edge to access networks with high packet erasure rates (e.g. mobile networks). This helps detecting and correcting packet losses efficiently, by tailoring the error protection code characteristics to the observed packet erasure rate of the receiver. Our erasure code is a parity code and relics solely on XOR-operations for encoding and decoding; hence, it shows very high efficiency compared to other more sophisticated codes. Simulation results show that our introduced erasure code outperforms the classical Reed-Solomon erasure codes in terms of perceived video quality, while running considerably faster.