25-04-2012, 02:34 PM
ENHANCING A VOICE-ENABLED WEB BROWSER FOR THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED
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INTRODUCTION
With advancements of the internet software and high-speed connection, it is undeniable that
surfing the web has become an integral part of many people’s lives. While the web seems to
be an ideal source of information and service for many people, it is currently far from ideal for
the blinds and people with low vision. It is clear that visually-impaired population usually has
some difficulties using the web, let alone reaping the web’s full benefits appreciated by people
with normal sight. An obvious source of difficulties for the visually impaired to surf the web
is due to the fact that most web content is presented visually, i.e. in the forms of texts and
pictures, on web browsers. Digital contents in other formats with sounds included may be
available on some web sites but very scarcely. More importantly, such contents are not
intended to solely represent the overall content of a webpage.
Hierarchical Structured Content
A webpage-reader program usually reads webpage content in order of appearance. This way,
the information is presented sequentially regardless of the organization of the real content.
Users with normal sight can visually capture the structure of the webpage content via its
formatting and be able to make a mental model of its organization. However, with the absence
of visual information, the visually impaired are easily lost after the program reads the
webpage content for a while. Consider an illustration of a webpage content structure in Fig.1.
This webpage contains an article on volcanoes1. The sizes of the fonts, the bold faces, and the
use of underlines in this illustration resemble the formatting used in the original webpage.
Such formatting naturally helps the reader understand the organization of the content. If this
content is read by a webpage-reader sequentially from top to bottom without presenting any
cues to the topic hierarchy, visually-impaired users could easily have troubles understanding
how these topics are organized.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Implementation in CUVoiceBrowser
CUVoiceBrowser is a voice-enabled web browser, integrated with Thai automatic speech
recognition and multilingual TTS modules. Both the visually impaired and people with normal
sight are taken into consideration for the design of CUVoiceBrowser. Navigation can be done
via both traditional and voice inputs. Together with the webpage reading capability of the
TTS, voice commands allow users to perform most of the tasks required for accessing
mainstream contents on the web, including going to the desired URLs, following links shown
on the webpage, asking for the list of links on the webpage, opening the user’s bookmark
page, navigating forward and backward, activating to the user’s pre-defined search procedure,
filling in web forms and performing search using character-wise data entry, controlling the
text reading of the TTS module, requesting instructions from its help page, and perform
simple program controls.
CONCLUSIONS
We proposed a method to arrange webpage content into a hierarchical structure using XMLbased
parsing templates. When webpage content is arranged in such a structure, it is easy for a
webpage-reader program that supports the structured content to read the content to the users in
a more organized and controllable manner. This will help the visual impaired navigate through
the content of a webpage in a content-driven fashion. Such an approach is our next step to
help the visually impaired accessing web-based information beyond the use of a voice-enabled
web browser with a traditional webpage-reader module.