Accessing the web on handheld devices for visually impaired people

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an automatic summarization system to ease web browsing for visually impaired people on handheld devices. In particular, we propose a new architecture for summarizing Semantic Textual Units [2] based on efficient algorithms for linguistic treatment [3][6] which allow real-time processing and deeper linguistic analysis of web pages, thus allowing quality content visualization. Moreover, we present a text-to-speech interface to ease the understanding of web pages content. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use both statistical and linguistic techniques for text summarization for browsing on mobile devices. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.