Chula-FungPloen: assistive software for listening to online contents

For the visually-impaired, accessing to online contents is usually limited and involved relatively complex procedures. Browsing for contents, textual or rich-media, on most web pages is unfriendly, if at all accessible. A program called Chula-FungPloen has been developed to provide a universal mean for the visually-impaired to listen to heterogeneous forms of contents available on the web, including web pages, streamed audio media, online audio files, RSS feeds, DAISY audiobooks and YouTube videos, without the users being awareness of the original formats. Self-voicing functionalities assist users in navigating through organized contents supplied via a web-based back-end. Its graphical and aural interfaces are aimed for users with different levels of visual-impairments. A built-in text-to-speech module is used to handle textual contents while mechanisms in detecting unavailable contents are also introduced. Special considerations on the program's usability include a high-contrast choice of colors, an adjustable font size, a minimal set of navigation/control key strokes and the screen reader interoperability. An experimental case study involving a blind user has shown that using the program can help the users accessing contents more promptly.