A Web navigation tool for the blind

The aim of our work is to make the wealth of information on the World Wide Web more readily available to blind people. They must be able to search efficiently for relevant information and make quick and effective decisions about the usefulness of pages they retrieve. We have built a prototype application called BrookesTalk which we believe addresses this need more fully than ouier Web browsers. Information retrieval techniques are used to provide a set of complementary options which summarise a Web page and enable rapid decisions about its usefulness.