This final year ITBML project entailed writing a research proposal for a collaborative project between Alistair Edwards from The University of York and a group in France conducting similar research.
The project is in two sections:
The literature review traced the progress of two research teams in France, INSERM (Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale) and IRIT (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse) and compared this to research conducted at the University of York.
All three groups were found to be addressing the problems created by the introduction of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) in the early 1980s. Whilst GUIs have made it easier for sighted people to access information on computers they have created problems for blind users. The reason for this is that the screen contents are stored as bit-maps (rather than ASCII characters) which cannot be read by screen-readers. All three groups have used a combination of sound (speech and non-speech) and Braille to develop multimodal interfaces which aim to give blind people access to the same information and in a similar way to their sighted colleagues.
Research at INSERM has centred on developing systems to help in the education of (mainly blind) disabled children. The most recent project has been the creation of a specialised web-browser for blind people, together with a set of ‘user friendly’ web pages which blind people can both explore and use as a springboard to access other pages on the World Wide Web. Details of the project can be found by accessing the BrailleNet web site following the link below:
Since 1992 the research team at IRIT has concentrated on developing a multimodal interface which gives blind people access to electronic documents in the same way as sighted users. Most recently the group has focused on making the World Wide Web accessible to blind people by extending their system to access pages written in HTML. Details of the project can be found by following the link below:
Recent research at York has concentrated on the development of a multimodal maths workstation to enable blind students to read and manipulate algebraic expressions. The project was funded by the European Commission under its Tide programme (Technology Initiative for Disabled and Elderly persons). Details of the project can be found by following the link below:
Advice was needed on how to write a research proposal before one could be written. The following web site was found to be useful:
The RNIB’s Webpage on ‘Hints for designing accessible Websites’ was consulted before writing this page. Do you think it deserves the Speech Friendly Ribbon Award? You can let me know by e-mail.
For an example of how not to design accessible Web pages for blind people take a look at the French language pages I wrote as part of a project to develop an ITBML Web site providing course information and language resource pages for fellow ITBML students at the University of York.
My home page is still under construction, but can be accessed by following this link: To Chris Wood’s Home Page .
Return to Alistair Edwards Teaching page
Notes
ITBML – Follow this link for details of the course in Information Technology, Business Management and Language (ITBML) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York.
Multimodal Interfaces – A interface is deemed to be multimodal if there are a number of ways of doing the same thing (e.g. music, text synthesis and digital synthesis are all examples of auditory modalities), or several senses are used to communicate information (e.g. sight, hearing and touch)
This page was written by Chris Wood, but is now maintained by Alistair Edwards (alistair@cs.york.ac.uk) and was last updated on 14th February 2002.