Accessing the World Wide Web By Telephone

The work described in this paper was funded under the HEFCE initiative for widening access to Higher Education for disabled people, described in Zajicek & Greenhead, (1996). The problem of visually impaired people using a computer with a graphical user interface is being addressed. Current provision in terms of Braille and speech screen readers tends to be unsatisfactory, Laux et al, (1996), Petrie et al, (1993), and Stephanidis et al, (1995), and does not present the information conceptually. We have built a helper application WebChat which builds a conceptual model of World Wide Web pages and describes them using speech for visually impaired people and can be used over the telephone. This paper examines the viability of computer interaction over the telephone in the context of searching for information on the World Wide Web.