AN ACCESSIBLE WEB-BASED INFORMATION BROADCASTING
SYSTEM FOR BLIND PEOPLE
Hsiao Ping Lee
Department of Applied Computer Sciences, Chung Shan Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan, R.O.C.
Department of Medical Research, Chung Shan Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan, R.O.C.
Chien-Hsing Chen
Department of Applied Computer Sciences, Chung Shan Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan, R.O.C.
Tzu-Fang Sheu
Department of Computer Science and Communication Engineering, Providence University, Taichung, Taiwan, R.O.C.
Keywords:
Accessibility for blind people, Accessible information broadcasting system, Accessible web applications,
Ubiquitous information access.
Abstract:
Generally, audio data is most accessible to the blind. One of the possible ways to improve the web acces-
sibility for the blind is to provide them with the information in audio format. It is essential to develop an
automatic and customized system for blind people that converts the information on the Internet to audio in
real-time. In this paper, we propose a novel accessible information broadcasting system, which is specific
designed for blind people. The proposed system provides an audio-based information broadcasting service
with an accessible web interface. The proposed system searches and converts the customized information on
the Internet or user-specified articles to audio. Via modern text-to-speech technology, the conversion can be
done automatically. By subscribing preferred subjects, blind people can access the information that they are
interested in periodically without barriers. Moreover, the user interface of the proposed system is approved at
A
+
certification level under web accessibility guidelines. That is, blind people can access abundant informa-
tion on the Internet on demand by using the proposed system. The proposed system approaches the goal of
realizing friendly access of the Internet for blind people.
1 INTRODUCTION
The Internet is an increasingly important resource in
many aspects of life: education, employment, com-
merce, health care, entertainment, and more. It has
become one of the most important media for people to
obtain information. Through the Internet, people can
access interesting and real-time information. How-
ever, the accessibility for blind people is not fully con-
sidered in the design of every website. Many websites
have accessibility barriers that make them difficult or
impossible for blind people to access the content in
the sites. It leads unequal access and unequal oppor-
tunity to blind people.
The information in audio format might be most
accessible to blind people. Audio-based information
broadcasting services on the Internet might help blind
people to obtain new information effectively. Inter-
net radio (Hoeg and Lauterbach, 2009; Kozamernik
and Mullane, 2005) and podcasting (Harvard, 2010)
are two commonly available audio-based services on
the Internet. Internet radio, like traditional broad-
casting media, presents users with continuous audio
streams, except the audio is transmitted via the Inter-
net. Podcasting works with RSS (Really Simple Syn-
dication) (Winer, 2001; Winer, 2003). Unlike Internet
radio, users can decide what programs they want to
receive and when they want to listen to the programs
in the podcasting service. In addition, any individual
can create a podcast that interested listeners can sub-
scribe to.
However, the user interfaces of some Internet ra-
dio services are too complex to be accessible to blind
people. Besides, users must employ a special client
software, for example podcatcher to use the podcast-
ing service, but the accessibility for blind people is
404
Lee H., Chen C. and Sheu T..
AN ACCESSIBLE WEB-BASED INFORMATION BROADCASTING SYSTEM FOR BLIND PEOPLE.
DOI: 10.5220/0003335904040407
In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2011), pages 404-407
ISBN: 978-989-8425-51-5
Copyright
c
2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
not considered in the design of the client software.
On the other hand, the Internet radio or podcasting
service does not convert the information in the Inter-
net to audio automatically. All of the content provided
in the services must be pre-made by human beings. It
means that if a blind person finds some interesting ar-
ticles in the Internet, or moreover, want to subscribes
some interesting subjects, he (or she) is unable to ac-
cess the preferred articles immediately via the Inter-
net radio or podcasting service until there is someone
made the articles as podcasts or Internet radio pro-
grams. Moreover, without the assistance of sighted
people, blind people can not convert specified data to
audio, or share it to others via the services. The prob-
lem of requiring the assistance of sighted people for
Internet information access is not completely solved
by the Internet radio and podcasting services. Thus,
it is essential to develop an information broadcasting
system that provides equal access and equal opportu-
nity to blind people.
In this paper, we propose an accessible infor-
mation broadcasting (AIB) system for blind peo-
ple. It is a web-based application. The user inter-
face of the AIB system is approved at A
+
certifica-
tion level under Accessible Web Development Guide-
lines (AWDG) (RDEC, 2009). The AIB system pro-
vides an information broadcasting service that com-
bines both audio-based and text-based content. It is
a brand-new model for information access, and it is
an innovative intelligent web-based service. To ac-
cess the content of an article in a website, the only
thing that users have to do is to specify the URL
(Uniform Resource Locator) of the article. When
the access request is received, the AIB system re-
trieves content from the article, and then converts the
content to audio automatically. Both online listen-
ing and downloading for private listening are sup-
ported in the system. Moreover, the AIB system al-
lows users to subscribe subjects that they are inter-
ested in websites. The system gets and processes the
articles related to the subjects automatically and pe-
riodically. The AIB system also supports private text
file conversion. All of the functions supported by the
AIB system are accessible to blind users. The AIB
system benefits blind people to subscribe and access
the abundant information in the Internet. The im-
plementation of the AIB system uses several popular
web technology and techniques, such as RSS, XML
(Extensible Markup Language) (IETF, 2001; Murata
et al., 2009), SAX (Simple API for XML) (Brownell,
2002; Bodie, 2002), TTS (Text-To-Speech) (Allen
et al., 1987; Santen, 1997; Dutoit, 2001), JSP (JAVA
Server Pages) (Avedal et al., 2000; Murach and Steel-
man, 2008), and AJAX (AsynchronousJavaScript and
XML) (Ullman and Dykes, 2007; Crane et al., 2005;
Zakas et al., 2006). The use of the technology and
techniques make the system efficient and responsive.
Furthermore, The AIB system is also able to serve
persons who must read through hearing temporarily,
for example drivers. The system provides users, es-
pecially blind users, with ubiquitous and accessible
reading through the use of hearing anytime and any-
where, which will realize the goal of smart and inde-
pendent living.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The
implementation of the web-based accessible informa-
tion broadcasting system is presented in Section 2.
The functionality of the proposed system is described
in Section 3. Finally, we conclude the paper in Sec-
tion 4.
2 THE ACCESSIBLE
INFORMATION
BROADCASTING SYSTEM
The accessible information broadcasting (AIB) sys-
tem is a novel web-based information system. It is
designed specifically for blind people to obtain infor-
mation in the Internet. The AIB system automatically
converts text-based RSS articles to audio, and simul-
taneously provides text-based and audio-based infor-
mation broadcasting services. The system also sup-
ports the conversion of private text documents, and
provides downloadable audio files. To increase pro-
cessing efficiency, the data mining-based analysis is
adapted in the AIB system. In addition, the acces-
sibility issues for blind people are considered in the
design of system interface. Due to the implementa-
tion of the accessibility solutions , the AIB system is
accessible to blind people.
The AIB system is composed mainly of five mod-
ules: RSS agent, article content parser, text-to-speech
(TTS) engine, real-time photo search engine and web
page generator. All of the modules are implemented
in JAVA-based technology and techniques. The sys-
tem architecture is presented in Figure 1.
The RSS agent is implemented in the multi-
threading technique. The agent accesses remote sites
periodically, and check the status of the RSS articles
in the sites. If a new or updated article is found, the
agent gets the latest version of the article automati-
cally. The downloaded article is stored in an individ-
ual local file, which is in its original XML format.
The file and the attributes of the file (or article), such
as the path, size, category, subject and updated date,
are packed into a data structure called article instance.
AN ACCESSIBLE WEB-BASED INFORMATION BROADCASTING SYSTEM FOR BLIND PEOPLE
405
An article instance represents an article in a remote
site. The AIB system builds a hierarchical indexing
system on the article instances to increase retrieval ef-
ficiency.
The article content parser module is used to re-
trieve content from the article instances. Since the
article content requires to be read only once and se-
quentially, SAX is used in the module to parse the
XML codes in the article instances. Compared with
the other alternativeof XML parser, DOM (Document
Object Model) (Garet, 2002), SAX is more efficient
and less memory requirement in this case. If the arti-
cle is already in text format, which might be uploaded
directly from users, it is passed immediately to output
without further parsing. The output of the module is
in text format, and is delivered to both the TTS engine
and web page generator as input.
The TTS engine module converts text data to
speech in WAV or MP3 format. The downloadable
audio files are prepared simultaneously. The mod-
ule utilizes the multi-threading technique to achieve
fast response and high throughput. The TTS en-
gine is an implementation of Microsoft SAPI (Speech
API) (Microsoft, 2010) interface, and is compatible
with SAPI 5 specification. The TTS engine pro-
vides various voices in multiple languages, and all
attributes, such as intensity, speed and pitch, of the
voices are dynamically adjustable. A configuration
file is used in the TTS engine to record the default
values of the attributes of every available voice. The
list of available voices and the default voice for each
supported languages are also recorded in the configu-
ration file. In addition, a sentence splitter, that splits
input sentences into partitions of identical languages,
is implemented in the module. The splitter ensures
the overall sentence is correctly pronounced.
The real-time photo search engine module uses ar-
ticle instances as input. The module analyses the in-
put, and then, based on the analysis results, searches
for the photos related to the article. The content analy-
sis is accomplished based on data mining techniques.
Google APIs are used in the implementation of the
module. The APIs make it more efficient to accom-
plish the photo search and integrate the photos into
web pages. The photos, with the context, provide
more information about the article for the quick un-
derstanding of the article.
The web page generator module combines the in-
put from the article content parser, TTS engine and
real-time photo search engine to generate the web
page for users’ requests. The module is implemented
in JSP technology. The AJAX technique is also uti-
lized in the module to achieve a fast response. In
addition, a pre-fetch strategy is used in the module
Figure 1: The architecture of the AIB system.
to fetch possible next articles beforehand. The pre-
fetch processing is accomplished based on data min-
ing analyses. The pre-fetch increases the efficiency
of the module. To make the web page accessible to
blind people, the accessibility issues are considered
in the design of the web pages. The accessibility so-
lutions for blind people, such as keyboard equivalents
for mouse-driven commands, access keys and alter-
native text, are implemented in every web page pro-
duced by the module.
3 THE SYSTEM FEATURES AND
FUNCTIONS
The proposed AIB system, except the TTS engine
module, was implemented on a PC with one Intel Pen-
tium 4 3.0GHz CPU, 768MB RAM and 80GB disk
space. The operating system was Microsoft Windows
XP home edition. The TTS engine was implemented
on a PC with one Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33GHz
dual-core CPU, 2GB RAM and 160 disk space. The
operating system was Microsoft Windows XP profes-
sional edition. All of the modules in the AIB system
were implemented in JAVA language.
The AIB system provides a web interface for users
to access the service. The web interface satisfies the
criteria of A
+
certification under the AWDG. The or-
ganization of the web page includes four areas: nav-
igation, text content, photo gallery, and player func-
tions. The home page of the AIB system is presented
in Figure 2.
The navigation area provides quick access to dif-
ferent subjects, including news, magazines, English
learning, customization and user’s guide. In the news
and magazine subjects, the AIB system shows the lat-
est news and articles in different categories, where the
news are retrieved from a RSS provider that system
pre-defined. In the English learning page, it provides
English articles in text and audio format simultane-
ously. Therefore, people can read and listen to the
article at the same time, which helps people learning
English as a second language. In the customization
page, users can upload a text file or provide a RSS
provider in URL, and then the AIB system will con-
WEBIST 2011 - 7th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
406
Figure 2: The home page of the AIB system.
vert the preferred content into an MP3 file for down-
load. Finally, the user’s guide page describes the func-
tions of the AIB system and the manual of this web
service.
The text and photo gallery area change their con-
tent while a user selects or switches to a different ar-
ticle. The article’s title, content and release time are
all shown in the text area and the corresponding au-
dio le. The player functions’ area has five buttons
to control the audio player and to switch articles in
sequence, including start, stop, next article, previous
article, auto-play, and download.
In order to provide an accessible and friendly in-
terface to blind people, the AIB system applies access
keys to trigger the functions of the proposed AIB web
service.
4 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we propose an accessible information
broadcasting system for blind people. It is at A
+
certi-
fication level under the Accessible Web Development
Guidelines. The proposed system automatically con-
verts the information in the Internet to audio. It ben-
efits blind people to access the information. By us-
ing the proposed system, blind people is able to ac-
cess the information that they are interested in the In-
ternet on demand, without relying on the assistance
of sighted people. The proposed system provides a
good solution, hearing the Internet, for blind people
to solve the problem of Internet information access.
Moreover, the proposed system provides blind people
with ubiquitous access of the Internet through the use
of hearing anytime and anywhere, which will realize
smart and independent living for blind people.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank the National Science
Council of the Republic of China, Taiwan, for finan-
cially supporting this research under Grants NSC99-
2218-E-040-001.
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