Text-to-speeches: evaluating the perception of concurrent speech by blind people

Over the years, screen readers have been an essential tool for assisting blind users in accessing digital information. Yet, its sequential nature undermines blind people's ability to efficiently find relevant information, despite the browsing strategies they have developed. We propose taking advantage of the Cocktail Party Effect, which states that people are able to focus on a single speech source among several conversations, but still identify relevant content in the background. Therefore, oppositely to one sequential speech channel, we hypothesize that blind people can leverage concurrent speech channels to quickly get the gist of digital information. In this paper, we present an experiment with 23 participants, which aims to understand blind people's ability to search for relevant content listening to two, three or four concurrent speech channels. Our results suggest that it is easy to identify the relevant source with two and three concurrent talkers. Moreover, both two and three sources may be used to understand the relevant source content depending on the task intelligibility demands and user characteristics.