The User Experience
This section details the experience when using the speech-enabled Emacs W3
browser within the context of the audio desktop provided by the Emacspeak
environment.
Audio Formatted Output
Well-structured WWW content is
rendered using the technique of audio formatting introduced in AsTeR (Audio
System For Technical Readings[1]).
When using the default speech style sheet,
Emacspeak renders structural components of the document, e.g., section
headings at different levels, as well as hyperlinks in distinctive voices,
thereby obviating the need to cue the listener to the document structure using
added verbiage such as hot link
.
Auditory Icons
Emacspeak uses auditory icons --short snippets of non-speech sounds--
throughout the audio desktop to provide succinct aural confirmation in
response to user actions.
In the context of the WWW browser, auditory icons are used to:
- Indicate movement through the links in a document.
- Indicate the manipulation of interactive form elements, such as pressing
a button, or toggling a checkbox.
- Indicate that the document was scrolled.
- Indicate activation of a link.
- An aural progress monitor (the sound of water dripping)to
indicate the downloading of a document.
- Indicate the opening and closing of WWW documents.
Fill Out Forms
As described earlier, Emacspeak and W3 provide a fluent speech environment for
interacting with fill-out forms on the WWW. This section outlines the speech
feedback a user hears when traversing standard dialogue elements such as
checkboxes, radio button groups and pull down lists. The following list
enumerates each user interface element along with the messages spoken by the
system when traversing or manipulating these elements. For each interface
element, we show a template for the utterance, and where necessary a
concrete example where the template has been instantiated.
- CheckBox
- Simple Toggle
- Traverse
- Option option name or label
is checked
Option search all pages is checked.
- Toggle State
- Unchecked search all pages
- Radio Button
- Mutually exclusive selection
- Traverse
- If button is pressed:
Group group caption if available currently set to button name or
label.
Group kind of coffee set to
Expresso
If the button is not pressed:
Press this to select Expresso as the kind of
coffee
- Press
- Change state of group
When a radio button is pressed, the user hears the sound
of a button being pressed,
and a spoken message indicating the updated state of the
radio group.
- Pull Down List
- Select one or more elements
- Traverse
- List name or label currently set to
value
List how many hits currently set to 100
- Change selection
- Selecting from a set with completion.
System speaks current selection if any, and
optionally prompts for the possible choices. The user can
type ahead to interrupt speaking of the choices, and the
system provides incremental completion and also speaks the
list of matching choices based on what is typed.
The presence of the label enables Emacspeak to produce user friendly
messages.
In the absence of this semantic encoding, the system speaks the
name of the field.
This fall back strategy can work well when the name assigned to
the field in the HTML encoding is meaningful; but this is often
a function of the CGI script that processes the form.
Typically, the name of a form field is the variable in the CGI
script associated with that field; as a consequence, without
the presence of the label, the speech user is left at
the mercy of the variable naming convention used by the author
of the server-side script that processes the form.
Accessing Information Efficiently
The tight integration of Emacspeak, W3, and the rest of the Emacs environment
makes for a pleasant user experience;
accessing WWW information that is being referred to in an email
message or news article is only a keystroke away.
This section enumerates a few simple user scenarios to give the
reader a taste of the power available in this environment:
- When reading an email message, news article etc.,
that points the reader at a particular WWW
resource, the user can move to the URL with a single keystroke, and follow it
to have the page loaded into the browser with one further keystroke.
This kind of information access is crucial in a day-to-day work environment
where the WWW is increasingly becoming an essential tool.
- Incorporating content present on WWW pages into
other desktop applications happens seamlessly.
When filling out forms, information can be easily
moved from currently open documents on the desktop into the
appropriate fillout fields.
- Efficient hotlist management, combined with interactive completion based on sites most recently visited enables the user to revisit sites quickly and efficiently.
T. V. Raman
Email: raman@adobe.com
Last modified: Tue Feb 18 15:46:47 1997