Internet explorer smart toolbar for the blind

Abstract

Accessing information on the internet is a very common task nowadays. However, the ability to do such a task is rather limited for the disabled, especially the visually-impaired. In order to serve this special group of users, a specially-designed web browsing application is needed. Having examined the need of the visually-impaired users from a major Thai school for the blinds in Bangkok, we propose a web browsing scheme in the form of a toolbar-styled plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer. This plugin enables the program to interact with users via Thai language speech interface utilizing Text-To-Speech and voice recognition technologies previously deployed in its predecessor which is, in contrary, a stand-alone web browser. One of the features of this toolbar is its support for arranging webpage contents into a hierarchical structure that better represents the relationship among contents on the page based on its visual layout using simple user-definable XML templates. Additional features include website suggestion and web feed reader. This paper also presents some brief users' experience and discusses directions of improving this toolbar.