Abstract
Blind people and in general print-impaired people are often restricted to use their own computers, enhanced most often with expensive, screen reading programs, in order to access the web, and in a form that every screen reading program allows to. In this paper we present SpellCast Navi, a tool that is intended for people with visual impairments, which attempts to combine advantages from both customized and generic web enhancement tools. It consists of a generically designed engine and a set of case-specific filters. It can run on a typical web browser and computer, without the need of installing any additional application locally. It acquires and parses the content of web pages, converts bi-lingual text into synthetic speech using high quality speech synthesizer, and supports a set of common functionalities such as navigation through hotkeys, audible navigation lists and more. By using a post-hoc approach based on a-priori information of the website’s layout, the audible presentation and navigation through the website is more intuitive a more efficient than with a typical screen reading application. SpellCast Navi poses no requirements on web pages and introduces no overhead to the design and development of a website, as it functions as a hosted proxy service.
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Chalamandaris, A., Raptis, S., Tsiakoulis, P., Karabetsos, S. (2009). Enhancing Accessibility of Web Content for the Print-Impaired and Blind People. In: Holzinger, A., Miesenberger, K. (eds) HCI and Usability for e-Inclusion. USAB 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5889. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10308-7_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10308-7_17
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