Lori Stefano Petrucci

An audio-haptic tool for non-visual image representation

This paper reports on the design of an audio-haptic tool that enables blind computer users to explore a picture by the hearing and feeling modalities. The tool is divided in two entities: a description tool and an exploration tool. The description tool allows moderators (sighted person) to describe a scene. Therefore, the scene is firstly segmented manually or automatically into a set of objects (car, tree, house, etc.). For. every object, the moderator can define a behavior which correspond either to an auditory (i.e., using speech or non-speech sound) or to a kinesthetic rendering. The blind person uses the exploration tool in order to obtain the audio-haptic rendering of the segmented image previously defined by the moderator. Depending on the nature of the feedback defined (audio, kinesthetic), the blind user interacts either with a graphic tablet and/or a force feedback device.

Websound: a generic web sonification tool allowing HCI researchers to dynamically create new access modalities

The World Wide Web (WWW) has recently become the main source of digital information accessible everywhere and by everyone. Nevertheless, the inherent visual nature of Internet browsers makes the Web inaccessible to the visually impaired. To solve this problem, non-visual browsers have been developed. One of the new problems, however, with those non-visual browsers is that they often transform the visual content of HTML documents into textual information only, that can be restituted by a text-to-speech converter or a Braille device. The loss of spatial layout, and textual attributes such as boldface, italic, underline, color or even size should be avoided since they often bear visually important information. Moreover, typical non-visual Internet browsers do not allow visually impaired and sighted individuals to easily work together using the same environment. These new problems have to be solved with new alternative non-visual display techniques. This paper presents WebSound, a new generic Web sonification tool and its application to a 3D audio augmented Internet browser (Internet Explorer 5.0) developed at the University of Geneva.

An image-capable audio Internet browser for facilitating blind user access to digital libraries

The Internet now permits widespread access to textual and pictorial material from digital libraries. The widespread use of graphical user interfaces, however, increasingly bars visually handicapped people from using such material. We present here our current work aimed at the adaptation of an Internet browser to facilitate blind user access to digital libraries. The main distinguishing characteristics of this browser are: (1) active user interaction, both for the macro-analysis and micro-analysis of screen objects of interest; (2) use of a touch-sensitive screen to facilitate user interaction; (3) generation of a virtual sound space into which the screen information is mapped; (4) transcription into sounds not only of text, but also of images. Several prototypes have been implemented, and are being evaluated by blind users.