Tactile web browsing for blind people

Information on the World Wide Web becomes more and more important for our society. For blind people this is a chance to access more information for their everyday life. In this paper we propose novel methods to present web pages including graphical information on a tactile output device. We present a Mozilla Firefox Extension for the tactile rendering of web pages and for the handling of user interactions. This approach benefits from the Firefox built-in web page handling including parsing of HTML documents, formatting with cascading style sheets (CSS), handling of dynamic web content controlled by JavaScript code, etc. Graphical information can be explored and filtered interactively in a special mode for raster images and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Mathematical expressions encoded in the mathematical markup language (MathML) are transformed directly into LaTeX or into a notation for blind people. The tactile web browser supports feedback that is provided via voice output.