Authors:
Federico Bergenti
;
Lorenzo Lazzari
;
Marco Mari
and
Agostino Poggi
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy
Keyword(s):
Web portals, Vocal interaction, Human-computer interaction.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Accessibility Issues and Technology
;
Multimedia and User Interfaces
;
Portal Strategies
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
;
Web Interfaces and Applications
Abstract:
The growing request of innovative, multimodal interfaces for mobile users and the need of different navigation paradigms for impaired Internet users are promoting and driving nowadays research on multimodal interactions. In this paper we present our experiences in the integration of vocal components in a portal engine, namely Apache Jetspeed. First, we discuss the reasons why the integration of a full-featured portal brings significant advantages to the development of a vocal platform. Then, we describe two complementary approaches for enhancing portals with vocal capabilities, and we compare them under various standpoints. The first approach that we investigate is based on a server-side speech synthesizer, while the second relies on client-side technologies, X+V and the SALT markup languages. For each of these approaches we present some examples and we discuss advantages and drawbacks.