Initial design and evaluation of an interface to hypermedia systems for blind users

Abstract

Access to information in electronic forms is currently difficult for blind people, but electronic information, particularly hypermedia, provide great potential to overcome the difficult ies that blind people have in accessing information. The E.U. funded ACCESS Project is developing tools to facilitate user interfaces which will be adaptable to the needs of different user groups. One demonstrator developed with these tools is a hypermedia system for blind students. This paper presents the initial designs for the hypermedia system which has a non-visual interface named DAHNI (Demonstrator of the ACCESS Hypermedia Non-visual Interface). DAHNI can be used with a variety of assistive inputioutput systems for blind users. Output from the system includes synthetic and digitised speech, non-speech sounds and refreshable Braille; input to the system can be via a small or large touchtablet, joystick, and/or conventional keyboard. This paper presents an evaluation of DAHNI by seven blind and partially sighted students. Plans for further development and evaluation of the system are also discussed.

Making Graph-Based Diagrams Work in Sound: The Role of Annotation

“…The type of non-linear information that has received the most attention from accessibility researchers is hypertext (Petrie, Morley, McNally, O'Neill, and Majoe, 1997;Yesilada, Harper, Goble, and Stevens, 2004a), with the prize of efficient Web access as the main driver. These systems are largely text-based, in that the raw information is plain text, but the chunks of text are organised in a more complex way than a simple linear narrative.…”

Encapsulating intelligent interactive behaviour in unified user interface artefacts

“…Initially, it was validated in two case studies, namely, the development of a hypermedia application for blind users [47] and the development of two interpersonal communication aids for speech-motor and language cognitive impaired users [48]. Both these developments were undertaken in the context of the ACCESS project (see Acknowledgements) and entailed the use of the tools of the unified user interface development platform by ACCESS consortium partners to construct the user interface components of the applications.…”

WIRE 3 : Driving Around the Information Super-Highway

“…Although far from perfect, screen readers provided visually impaired people with a tool for hearing the content of the screen until Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) became commonplace. The advent of the GUI made the task of screen reading more complex, thus inspiring research into GUIs for the blind [7,8]. Petrie et al [8] have conducted preliminary evaluations on input and output schemes to identify favorable hypermedia system interfaces for blind users.…”

“…The advent of the GUI made the task of screen reading more complex, thus inspiring research into GUIs for the blind [7,8]. Petrie et al [8] have conducted preliminary evaluations on input and output schemes to identify favorable hypermedia system interfaces for blind users. As screen readers are application software independent they can also be used to read the text displayed within a visual WWW browser.…”

“…Petrie [8] notes that visually impaired users can become disorientated during navigation without a mechanism for disambiguating these two link types. Moreover, Landow [25] advocates the use of a ''rhetoric of arrival and departure'' when authoring hypermedia documents for mitigating the effects of disorientation during navigation.…”