Two dimension interactive voice browser for the visually impaired

Abstract

Access to the World Wide Web is one of the major problems visually impaired people are confronted with. It is a good way to integrate voice functions into web browser for them to retrieve information on the web aurally. For the time being, most of the voice-driven navigation tools adopt linear strategy to translate each web page contents. That is too time-consuming for the visually impaired to get what they want. To promote the aural retrieving, this paper reports a Two Dimension Interactive Voice Browser design, which simulates the two dimensional reading of web page as sighted people do in a speech output/ voice input interactive way. This interactive web browser with voice would supply a new opportunity for the visually impaired to access information through the Internet. © Springer-Verlag 2004.