A Hybrid Segmentation of Web Pages for Vibro-Tactile Access on Touch-Screen Devices

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 Visually Impaired People (VIP) succeed to extract the visual and textual information displayed on digital screens and transform it in a linear way: either through a written format on special Braille devices or a vocal output using text-to-speech syn-thesizers. However, many researches confirm that perception of the layout of web pages en-hances web navigation and memorization. But, most existing screen readers still fail to trans-form the 2-dimension structures of web pages into higher orders. In this paper, we propose a new framework to enhance VIP web accessibility by affording a "first glance" web page overview, and by suggesting a hybrid segmentation algorithm to afford nested and easy navi-gation of web pages. In particular, the web page layout is transformed into a coarse grain structure, which is then converted into vibrating pages using a graphical vibro-tactile lan-guage. First experiments with blind users show interesting issues on touch-screen devices.

Domaines: Traitement du texte et du document

Waseem Safi, Fabrice Maurel, Jean-Marc Routoure, Pierre Beust, Gaël Dias. A Hybrid Segmentation of Web Pages for Vibro-Tactile Access on Touch-Screen Devices. 3rd Workshop on Vision and Language (VL 2014) associated to 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2014), Aug 2014, dublin, Ireland. pp.95 - 102. ⟨hal-01076613⟩