Nonvisual Presentation and Navigation within the Structure of Digital Text-Documents on Mobile Devices

摘要

This paper introduces a novel concept for an assistive technology in support of blind and visually impaired persons for nonvisual presentation and navigation within the structure of digital text-documents on mobile devices (smart phones, internet tablets, etc.) which enables them to get a fast overview over the structure of an entire document. The advantages compared to state of the art screen readers are that it enables them to identifying the type, position, length and context of each logical structure element, the current cursor position within the document as well as to accessing any structure element at any time in an arbitrary order. For the nonvisual presentation of the document structure elements auditory icons, tones and vibration feedback are used. Navigation and cursor routing is provided by performing gestures on the touch screen. There is no expensive special hardware required.