Enhancing a Voice-enabled Web Browser for the Visually Impaired

A vast body of digital content lies in the World Wide Web, to which people can access via web browsers. Automatic speech recognition as well as Text-toSpeech (TTS) components have been incorporated into some web browsers aiming to assist the visually impaired access web content. Various webpagereader programs usually read out textual content sequentially as appeared on the webpages. Many times, presenting a webpage’s content aurally in such a sequential fashion does not give visually-impaired users a clear picture of the content structure of that webpage. Furthermore, it is not uncommon that webpage-reader programs read texts that are unrelated to the main content. This paper proposes a hierarchical webpage content representation, which allows webpage content to be stored in a tree structure, and an associated XML that defines the parsing rules for parsing webpage content into the hierarchical representation. The parser was implemented in a Thai voice-enabled web browser with multilingual TTS capability, named CUVoiceBrowser, so that the targeted webpage content is parsed into the hierarchical representation before being read accordingly to the users. The browser’s command list was extended to support navigation through the hierarchical webpage content representation. A demonstration of the concept was shown by its application on the front page of a newspaper website.