Synchronizing Audio and Haptic to Read Webpage

Constantly emerging technologies present new interactive ways to convey
information on the Web. The new and enhanced website design has gradually
improved sighted users‟ understanding on the Web content but on the other hand,
it creates more obstacles to the visually impaired. The significant technological
gap in assistive technology and the Web presents on-going challenges to
maintain web accessibility, especially for disabled users. The limitations of
current assistive technology to convey non-textual information including text
attributes such as bold, underline, and italic from the Web further restrict the
visually impaired from acquiring comprehensive understanding of the Web
content. This project addresses this issues by investigating the problems faced by
the visually impaired when using the current assistive technology. The
significance of text attributes to support accessibility and improve understanding
of the Web content is also being studied. For this purpose several qualitative and
quantitative data collection methods are adopted to test the hypotheses. The
project also examines the relationship between multimodal technology using
audio and haptic modalities and the mental model generated by the visually
impaired while accessing webpage. The findings are then used as a framework
to develop a system that synchronizes audio and haptic to read webpages and
represents text attributes to visually impaired users is to be develop. From the
prototype built, pilot testing and user testing are conducted to evaluate the
system. The result and recommendations are shared at the end of project for
future enhancement.