The application presented in this paper aims at producing a novel user-friendly haptic environment to allow blind or visually impaired people to access interactive presentations based on HTML web pages. The application is based on haptic and audio feedback. Additionally, an automatic HTML-to-haptics conversion tool is developed in order provide a simple way to create interactive haptic presentations and a text to speech tool is used in order to create audio descriptions for the web pages. The environment has been evaluated using three presentations that were associated to computer access and useage. According to the users feedback the application was characterized as very useful.
Cite as: Nikolakis, G., Tsampoulatidis, I., Tzovaras, D., Strintzis, M.G. (2004) Haptic browser: a haptic environment to access HTML pages. Proc. 9th Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2004), 514-520
@inproceedings{nikolakis04b_specom,
author={Georgios Nikolakis and I. Tsampoulatidis and Dimitrios Tzovaras and Michael G. Strintzis},
title={{Haptic browser: a haptic environment to access HTML pages}},
year=2004,
booktitle={Proc. 9th Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2004)},
pages={514--520}
}