Browsing Tables When You Cannot See Them

Author:

Yeliz Yesilada

Email:

yeliz.yesilada-at-manchester.ac.uk

Advisor:

Professor Carole Goble

Award Date:

September 2000

Institution:

University of Manchester

Institution Location:

Manchester, UK

Web Location:

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~yesilady/publication/MscThesis.zip

Abstract:

The Internet relies on visual communication and thus causes difficulties to the Visually Impaired. Many Visually Impaired people access the Internet, particularly the World Wide Web (WWW), by listening to synthetic speech generated from machine-readable text. For ordinary text this works well. This is not, however, the case when reading tabular material; tables have many different forms of structure and many different ways of usage, and support a multiplicity of tasks.

This project addresses the problems Visually Impaired people have in browsing and reading tables and proposes solutions. We first analyze tables in order to understand the tasks undertaken by Visually Impaired people when browsing and reading tables and we review the recent technological advances in order to determine the capabilities they provide and their inefficiencies. These frameworks form the basis of a system developed to browse and read tables. The aim of the system is to enable Visually Impaired people access to tables as sighted people do and is named as EVITA, which stands for Enabling Visually Impaired Table Accessing. Finally we describe an experiment that was conducted for evaluating the system.