Speed-Dial: A Surrogate Mouse for Non-Visual Web Browsing

Sighted people can browse the Web almost exclusively using a mouse. This is because web browsing mostly entails pointing and clicking on some element in the web page, and these two operations can be done almost instantaneously with a computer mouse. Unfortunately, people with vision impairments cannot use a mouse as it only provides visual feedback through a cursor. Instead, they are forced to go through a slow and tedious process of building a mental map of the web page, relying primarily on a screen reader's keyboard shortcuts and its serial audio readout of the textual content of the page, including metadata. This can often cause content and cognitive overload. This paper describes our Speed-Dial system which uses an off-the-shelf physical Dial as a surrogate for the mouse for non-visual web browsing. Speed-Dial interfaces the physical Dial with the semantic model of a web page, and provides an intuitive and rapid access to the entities and their content in the model, thereby bringing blind people's browsing experience closer to how sighted people perceive and interact with the Web. A user study with blind participants suggests that with Speed-Dial they can quickly move around the web page to select content of interest, akin to pointing and clicking with a mouse.