Abstract
The increasing amount of new technologies (including multimedia, internet and virtual reality) allows us to use new approaches in design and implementation of applications of various kinds. Specific requirements emerge in the case of users with specific needs. One such example might be the use of 3D information in the web environment (and navigation in such an environment) by visually impaired users. Our solution provides semantic and functional description of the scene objects and inter-object relations in addition to “standard” geometric scene description. This approach permits the user to query for various information in the virtual environment (e.g. searching for a path to a specific object, searching for an object with specific properties and particularly filtering scene information). The system should allow the visually impaired user to virtually walk through the scene and query for information about the objects in a scene. In such a way they are able to obtain information that has been available to users without visual impairments. The user interface itself provides the feedback in accordance with the user’s group’s specific requirements - the feedback is implemented as a human readable text that can be simply accessed using one of the common accessibility tools (screen reader, Braille display etc.). The embedded module capable of providing speech output has also been implemented.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
SensAble Technologies. SensAble Technologies-Haptic Research. http://www.sensable.com/haptics/products/phantom.html (June 2002)
MEIJER, Peter B.L. The vOICe: Accessible VRML for the Blind. http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winvrml.htm (June 2002)
MIKOVEC, Zdenek; SLAVIK Pavel. Tool for Pictorial Data Transformations. In: Intelligent Multimedia, Computing and Communications, Technologies and Applications of the Future. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001, p. 10–19. ISBN 0-471-20435-8
Web3D Consortium. VRML Specification. http://www.web3d.org/technicalinfo/specifications/vrml97/ (June 2002)
Web3D Consortium. X3D Specification. (February 2002) http://www.web3d.org/TaskGroups/x3d/specification-2002february/index.html (June 2002)
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11. MPEG-7 Standard. (December 2001) http://mpeg.telecomitalialab.com/standards/mpeg-7/mpeg-7.htm (June 2002)
W3C. Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) W3C Recommendation. (October 15, 2001) http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/ (June 2002)
FAGIN Ronald. Fuzzy Queries in Multimedia Database Systems. ACM Press, 1998. ISBN 0-89791-996-3
NEMEC, Vladislav. User Interface for Blind. MSc. thesis, Czech Technical University. http://www.cgg.cvut.cz/~sloup/Diplomky/2002/VladislavNemec/ (June 2002)
NEMEC, Vladislav; SPORKA Adam J. The Blind’s Dog Project — User Interface Approach Evaluation and Testing Specification. (September 18, 2001) http://enorasi.avista.cz/bdn_testing.pdf (June 2002)
RASKIN, Jeff. The Humane Interface. Addison-Wesley, 2000. ISBN 0-201-37937-6
CARD, Stuart K.; MORAN, Thomas P.; NEWELL, Allen. The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Association, 1983. ISBN 0-898-59859-1
Sun Microsystems Inc. Java Speech API Specification. http://java.sun.com/products/javamedia/speech/forDevelopers/jsapi-doc.pdf (June 2002)
Speech Integration Group, Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Free TTS 1.1 — A speech synthesizer written entirely in the Java (TM) programming language. (January 2002) http://freetts.sourceforge.net/docs/ (June 2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Nemec, V., Mikovec, Z., Slavik, P. (2003). Adaptive Navigation of Visually Impaired Users in a Virtual Environment on the World Wide Web. In: Carbonell, N., Stephanidis, C. (eds) Universal Access Theoretical Perspectives, Practice, and Experience. UI4ALL 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2615. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36572-9_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36572-9_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-00855-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36572-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive