People:

• Marilyn Tremaine, project director
• Xiaoyu Chen, Ph.D. student
• Cliff Williams, former MSc. student
• Bob Lutz, Ph.D. student
• Jaewoo Chung, former MSc. student
• John Visicaro, MSc. student
• Daniel Rodriguez, MSc. student
• Patrick Lacsina, Ph.D. student

Description:

The AudioBrowser Project is developing a set of tools to support the browsing of web-based and personal information by blind and visually impaired users. Its main strategy is to use multi-modal input (touch and speech) in order to give users the ability to learn about an interface through exploration and to move through a collection of information similar to cascading menus on a visual screen display. A desktop and a personal data assistant (PDA) version of the software exist that allow users to download and read (via text to speech) daily newspapers or to manage their own personal data, telephone numbers, addresses, notes and music files through the same simple “touch and say” interface. Currently under development is a navigation tool that uses a sensor-based network and location-based methods to aid its user in navigating buildings.

Publications:

Chen, X.,Tremaine, M., Lutz, R., Chung, J-W., and Lacsina, P. AudioBrowser: A Mobile Browsable Information Access for the Visually Impaired. Universal Access in the Information Society, April 2005.

Chen, X., Chung, J-W., Lacsina, P. and Tremaine, M. Mobile Browsable Information Access for the Visually Impaired. Proceedings of the 2004 Amercas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2004, CDROM and AIS Digital Library (http://www.aisnet.org/), August 2004, 10 pages.

Lacsina, P., Chen, X. and Tremaine, M. Designing Non-Visual Bookmarks for the Mobile Knowledge Worker. Proceedings of the American Conference on Information Systems 2003, AMCIS 2003, August 2003, CDROM and AIS Digital Library (http://www.aisnet.org/), August 2003, 10 pages.

Williams, C. and Tremaine, M. M. SoundNews: An Audiobrowsing Tool for the Blind. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction UAHCI 2001, Elsevier, Amsterdam, August 2001.