Assistive Web Browsing with Touch Interfaces

This demonstration will propose a touch-based directional navigation technique, on touch interface (e.g., iPhone, Macbook) for people with visual disabilities especially blind individuals. Such interfaces coupled with TTS (text-to-speech) systems open up intriguing possibilities for browsing and skimming web content with ease and speed. Apple's seminal Voice Over system for iOS is an exemplar of bringing touch-based web navigation to blind people. There are two major shortcomings: "fat finger" and "finger-fatigue" problems, which have been addressed in this paper with two proposed approaches. A preliminary user evaluation of the system incorporating these ideas suggests that they can be effective in practice.