Voice browser for groupware systems: VoBG - A simple groupware client for visually impaired students

Abstract

A dedicated browser application named Voice Browser for Groupware systems (VoBG) was developed. The target users are visually impaired persons who are computer novices. This browser is a client application for a specified groupware system named Garoon 2, which is one of the most popular groupware system packages in Japan. The groupware is Web-based system and basically accessible for the visually impaired users. However, the structure of each Web page generated by the groupware server is too complicated to get information exactly for beginners with visual impairment. To solve this problem, VoBG reduces information of these pages using information of HTML tags, and reconstructs each page to understandable format for the target users. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.