Adaptive Navigation of Visually Impaired Users in a Virtual Environment on the World Wide Web

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.