Web Browsing for Visually Impaired People

From HLT@INESC-ID

Gaël Harry Dias
Gaël Harry Dias

Date

  • December 05, 2006
  • Location: Room 336

Speaker

Abstract

Although a lot has been done for Visually Impaired People to access information with Braille screens, Braille keyboards, Braille PDAs and Text-to-Speech interfaces, very little has been made to reduce the amount of information they have to deal with. In this presentation, we propose an automatic summarization system to ease web browsing for visually impaired people on handheld devices. In particular, we introduce different efficient methods for summarizing parts of web pages in real-time and include Text-to-Speech facilities. Two main approaches have already been proposed in the literature. First, some methodologies such as [1] [3] use simple summarization techniques to produce results in real-time but clearly lack linguistic treatment for reliable content visualization. Second, some works apply linguistic processing and rely on ad hoc heuristics [2] to produce compressed contents but can not be used in real-time environment. As a consequence, we propose a new architecture for summarizing Semantic Textual Units [1] based on efficient algorithms for linguistic treatment that allow real-time processing and deeper linguistic analysis of web pages, thus allowing quality content visualization. In this talk, we will also present the VIP-ACCESS project and the different talks that the members of the Centre for Human Language Technology and Bioinformatics will deliver.

[1] O. Buyukkokten, H. Garcia-Molina and A. Paepcke. Seeing the Whole in Parts: Text Summarization for Web Browsing on Handheld Devices. In Proc. of the 10th International World Wide Web Conference. (2000).

[2] P. Gomes, S. Tostão, D. Gonçalves and J. Jorge. Web-Clipping: Compression Heuristics for Displaying Text on a PDA. In Proc. of 3rd Workshop on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices. (2001).

[3] C. Yang and F.L. Wang. Fractal Summarization for Mobile Devices to Access Large Documents on the Web. In Proc. of the International World Wide Web Conference. (2003).