Syntherella: A Feedback Synthesizer for Efficient Exploration of Virtual Worlds using a Screen Reader

摘要

Thanks to the recent efforts, virtual worlds are, at the very least, partially accessible to users with visual impairments. However, generating effective non-visual descriptions for these environments is still a challenge. Sighted users can process an entire scene with many objects in an instant but screen reader users may easily get overwhelmed by this great amount of information when it is transformed into linear speech feedback. Additionally, user studies from our previous work show that iteratively querying the environment for detailed descriptions slows down the interaction significantly. Syntherella is a feedback synthesizer that aims to provide meaningful, effective yet concise textual representations of the virtual worlds while minimizing the required number of queries for accessing information.