The Audible WWW --The World In My Ears

T. V. Raman
Advanced Technology Group
Adobe Systems
Email: raman@adobe.com

Abstract

We describe a speech-enabled WWW browsing environment, one where synthetic speech is treated as a first-class output medium. The system described speech-enables the WWW by tightly integrating spoken feedback into the WWW browser, rather than simply speaking the result of visually displaying a WWW page. The resulting interface provides a fluent means of accessing information on the WWW in an eyes-free environment.

Screen-readers ---computer software that enables a visually impaired user to read the contents of a visual display--- have been available for more than a decade. Screen-readers are separate from the user application. Consequently, they have little or no contextual information about the contents of the display. The author has used traditional screen-reading applications for the last five years. The design of the speech-enabling approach described here has been implemented in Emacspeak to overcome many of the shortcomings he has encountered with traditional screen-readers.

The approach used by Emacspeak is very different from that of traditional screen-readers. Screen-readers allow the user to listen to the contents appearing in different parts of the display; but the user is entirely responsible for building a mental model of the visual display in order to interpret what an application is trying to convey. Emacspeak, on the other hand, does not speak the screen. Instead, applications provide both visual and speech feedback, and the speech feedback is designed to be sufficient by itself. This approach reduces cognitive load on the user and is relevant to providing general spoken access to information. Producing spoken output from within the application, rather than speaking the visually displayed information, vastly improves the quality of the spoken feedback.

Thus, an application can display its results in a visually pleasing manner; the speech-enabling component renders the same in an aurally pleasing way.

This approach has been very successful in speech-enabling the WWW. Tasks such as filling out interactive forms that are typically tedious when performed with visually oriented browsers and screen-readers can be performed fluently, leading to a productive and pleasurable WWW experience for the user.

Introduction

This section provides a brief introduction to the problems encountered when attempting to provide spoken access to information on the WWW using traditional access technologies such as screen-reading applications.

A Speech-Enabled WWW Browser

This section describes the overall architecture of the speech-enabled WWW browser available under Emacspeak.

Suggested Extensions To HTML Form Elements

This section outlines some useful extensions to HTML form elements that would enrich the overall user experience.

User Experience

Details the user experience when surfing the WWW on a speech board with Emacspeak.

References

Lists further readings.
T. V. Raman
Email: raman@adobe.com
Last modified: Tue Feb 18 17:36:22 1997


Return to Top of Page
Return to Access Index