The “growing up” of HyperBraille—an office workspace for blind people

Due to of their intuitive usage especially for novice users, graphical user interfaces (GUI) are nowadays a widespread user frontend for almost any kind of application. It is wellknown that the advantages to sighted users hide strong drawbacks for the community of blind people. Their special needs are not very well catered for the common software design. The control over GUI applications with their overlapping windows and buttons are no analog to the way blind people “see” their environment as it is for sighted people. Thus, the competitiveness of these p?ople is drastically reduced. The basic goal of HyperBraille is to enable blind or visually impaired people to participate as fully competitive members in today’s information technology oriented office worlds. We did not aim to create another tool to access graphical user interfaces but rather decided to realize a textscreen-oriented application especially for blind people which integrates tools to retrieve, create and exchange printed as well as electronic documents. Thereby we used the hypertext and formatting features of the Hypertext Markup Language HTML. On the other hand we adapted the GUI concept of the pulldot.vn menus to be customized on a Braille display. As for the sighted user, pull-down menus allow the novice user to immediately operate any application like word-processors or WWW-browsers without knowing the various key bindings. The development of HyperBraille started three years ago with the construction of a World Wide Web client that allowed easy access to all the documents of the Web[l 1]. This article will describe the new features of HyperBraille that are mostly driven by user feedback and by the needs for individual configurations of potential users, Permission to make digital/trard copies of all or part of tbk material for personal or clasaroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or dkibuted for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of tie publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copyright is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires specific permission and/or fee. UIST ’96 Seattle Washington USA @1996 ACM 0-89791-798-7/96/11 ..$3.50