For the hearing impaired

The accessibility features required for those with hearing problems are completely different from the requirements of the visually challenged. The former need tools like speech-to-text converters, sub-titles for audio clips and other visual alerts.

To convert speech into text, there are various speech recognition engines. One such powerful engine is CMU Sphinx, developed by Carnegie Mellon University. The features included in this tool kit are speech-to-text, audio transcriptions etc. CMU Sphinx can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmusphinx/.

An assistive tool that would be very useful for auditory challenged people is Hangout Captions. Those with hearing difficulties can use this tool to convert speech into text in real time during Google Hangout sessions. For further information on this tool, visit https://hangout-captions.appspot.com/.

There are various specialised gadgets for auditory challenged people. Interested users can go to http://www. deafgadgets.com/ to keep themselves updated with recent happenings in this domain.