A Comparative Study of Arabic Text-to-Speech Synthesis Systems

Text-to-speech synthesis is the process of converting written text to speech. The lack of research on the growth of and the need for the Arabic language is notable. Therefore, this paper reports an empirical study that systematically compares two screen readers, namely, NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) and IBSAR. We measured the quality of these two systems in terms of standard pronunciation and intelligibility tests with visually impaired or blind people. The results revealed that NVDA outperformed IBSAR on the pronunciation tests. However, both systems gave competitive performance on the intelligibility tests.