Speaking Web
An Intelligent Screen Reader for Websites
An Intelligent Screen Reader for Websites
Online websites is one of the major resources for people to access information. However, people who are visually impaired or blind have to put much more effort to use websites and most time end up receiving less information than normal people. The chances for them to succeed in school or work is therefore less than normal people. Recent research shows that in the US, around 7,297,100 (2.3% of population) people are diagnosed with blindness. Over 70% of them are not employed full-time and one of the major cause to that is their inability to use technical tools including websites and apps as well as us.
In our design, we plan to focus on two causes of the problem according to our research. The first one the the high learning curve, we hope to melt the instruction into the output of screen readers instead of asking our users to remember all hotkeys before being able to use the product. More importantly, we plan to mimic how people with normal eyesight use a website by changing the way current screen reader present information. We aim to propose a new hierarchical category which split a webpage into sections. By doing so, users will first have an understanding of how this website is organize, then jump directly into the section they want instead of listening to every detail of the given webpage. All in all, our product hope to help blind, or visually impaired, users to perceive information online in an easier and more efficient way.
Compared to traditional screen readers, our screen reader provides easy interaction.
Our application will not provide unnecessary information when accessing website
Our application will provide human-like conversations when browsing webpages.
Our Application will provide a clear structure of the webpage for users to choose from.
Prototype