Shortcomings of Reading the Screen a Diierent Approach

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 ve 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 diierent from that of traditional screen-readers. Screen-readers allow the user to listen to the contents appearing in diierent 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 suucient 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. Introduction A screen-reader is a computer application designed to provide spoken feedback to a visually impaired user. Screen-readers have been available since the mid-80's. During the 80's, such applications relied on the character representation of the contents of the screen to produce the spoken feedback. The advent of bitmap displays led to a complete breakdown of this approach, since the contents of the screen were now light and dark pixels. A signiicant amount of research and development has been carried out to overcome this problem and provide speech-access to the Graphical User Interface (GUI). The best and perhaps the most complete speech access system to the GUI is Screenreader/2 (ScreenReader For OS/2) developed by Dr. Jim Thatcher at the IBM Wat-son Research Center Tha94]. This package provides robust spoken access to applications under the OS2 Presentation Manager and Windows 3.1. Commercial packages for Microsoft Windows 3.1 provide varying levels of spoken access to the GUI. The Mercator project ME92, WKES94, MW94, Myn94] has focused on providing spoken access to the …