WebSound: a generic Web sonification tool allowing HCI researchers to dynamically create new access modalities                                                                

Lori Stefano Petrucci        , Eric Harth     , Patrick Roth     , Assimacopoulos Andr          , Thierry Pun      
Computer Science Department                                                        UCBA                      
CUI, University of Geneva                                  Swiss Central Union of and for the Blind         
CH  1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland                                    Schtzengasse 4, CH- 900 St-Gallen,           
+41 22 705 76 32                                                       Switzerland                    
Lori.Petrucci@cui.unige.ch                                                                                  


ABSTRACT
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.                           






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