Architecture of a web browser for visually handicapped people

Abstract

Internet has brought about an incredible improvement in human access to knowledge and information. However, blind people face difficulties in accessing these text materials. Web browsers for the visually handicapped people in the past have been limited to converting documents to Braille or speech, or extracting text and filtering. However, the human aspects of web surfing for blind people have not been adequately addressed. This paper presents an architecture of an open source, light weight web browser that makes it easy for the visually handicapped people to surf the web. The proposed architecture allows a blind person to navigate any web content through simple speech commands and voice feedback to any keyboard operation. The browser will have an integrated text extraction engine that inspects the content of the page to construct a structured representation. The internal nodes of the structure represent various levels of abstraction of the content. This helps in easy and flexible navigation of the page so as to rapidly home into objects of interest. Finally, the browser is integrated to an automatic Text-To-Speech and Text-To-Braille transliteration engine that outputs the selected text in the form of speech and/or Braille.