A tactile web browser for the visually disabled

Abstract

The dissemination of information available through the World Wide Web makes universal access more and more important and supports visually disabled people in their everyday life. In this paper we present a new approach for visually disabled people to browse and interact with web pages. Up to now graphical information is mostly ignored in transformations for visually disabled people. We propose a web browser, which uses a transformation schema to render web pages on a tactile graphics display. Bitmap images and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) can be explored in a special mode, in which filters can be applied and zooming is possible. Mathematical expressions encoded in the Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) are transformed into LaTeX or into a notation for visually disabled people. The web browser supports voice output to read text paragraphs and to provide feedback on interactions to the users.