Development of a GUI screen reader for blind persons

Abstract

Personal computers have been helping blind persons to deal with textual information. Recently, however, operating systems based on GUIs have been rapidly spreading in the personal computer environment. Since GUIs utilize many figures and appeal to the eye, they are inherently difficult to adapt for blind persons. For the purpose of providing blind persons with access to a GUI-based operating system, we have proposed and developed a screen reader that works on the basis of keyboard operation and corresponding speech output. This paper first discusses the problems of accessibility of GUIs to blind problems and proposes the use of a screen reader as a solution. Then, the development of a prototype screen reader, the evaluation of the prototype, and the functions of the new screen reader after revision based on evaluations are described. Lastly, the purposes blind persons have for using personal computers and the applications usable with the support of our screen reader are compared. The effectiveness of our approach is discussed. © 1998 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 29(13): 18–27, 1998

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