ERGONOMIC FACTORS FOR A SPEAKING COMPUTER INTERFACE

This paper is concerned with ergonomic design for access to the World Wide Web for blind or visually impaired users, including the growing number of elderly, who need to access information and for whom the visual nature of the World Wide Web poses enormous problems. We have built a Web browser named BrookesTalk which reads out the Web page in word, sentence and paragraph mode and offers different views of the page to simulate 'scanning' of its contents. The paper describes the conceptual models people use to scan the Web and how they are supported for blind and visually impaired users by BrookesTalk.