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

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

 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 ﬁle. 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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