WebTouch: An Audio-tactile Browser for Visually Handicapped People

摘要

The Internet offers new possibilities to the access of information, but sometimes the design of Web pages obstructs the contents making them inaccessible to everybody, especially for those people with visual disabilities. The problem has several sides. On the one hand, the inaccessible design of the pages. On the other hand, most of the browsers used to surf the net are thought to be managed by users without visual disabilities. Although there are tools to help in the right design of Web pages or in the interpretation of Web pages for people with visual handicaps, to our knowledge there is not an integrated tool useful for both, the designers and the visually handicapped users. Our research group has developed such a tool called KAI (Kit for the Accessibility to the Internet). KAI is based on two main pillars: a new markup language with accessibility features called Blind Markup Language (BML) and WebTouch, a multimodal browser taking blind people into special consideration. In this paper we focus on WebTouch and its two modalities for surfing the net: voice and tactile skills.