Blind Browsing on Hand-Held Devices: Touching the Web... to Understand it Better

Waseem Safi (1) , Fabrice Maurel (1) , Jean-Marc Routoure (2) , Pierre Beust (1) , Gaël Dias (1)

1 Equipe Hultech - Laboratoire GREYC - UMR6072
2 Equipe Electronique - Laboratoire GREYC - UMR6072

Navigating the Web is one of important missions in the field of computer accessibility. Many specialized techniques for VIP (Visually Impaired People) succeeded to extract the information displayed on digital screens and succeeded to transform this information in a linear way either into a written format on special Braille devices, or into a vocal output using text to speech synthesizers. However, although this success, screen readers failed to transform the 2-dimentional structure of the navigated web page; despite many researches confirm that perception the structure enhances web navigation and memorization. In this paper, we propose a new technique aimed to enhance the VIP ability to navigate the Web by affording a "first glance" web page overview. This technique focuses on improving non-visual vibro-tactile access to web pages on touch-screen devices, based on extraction and re-organization the structure of texts and graphical elements for web pages, reformatting and converting automatically these visual structures and textual information into vibrating pages using a graphical vibro-tactile language.

Mots clés: Visually impaired people; graphical vibrotactile language; visual structures; textual information; non-visual access

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]; Apprentissage [cs.LG]; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Waseem Safi, Fabrice Maurel, Jean-Marc Routoure, Pierre Beust, Gaël Dias. Blind Browsing on Hand-Held Devices: Touching the Web... to Understand it Better. Data Visualization Workshop (DataWiz 2014) associated to 25th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HYPERTEXT 2014), Sep 2014, Santiago, Chile. ⟨hal-01075380⟩