GUI admission for VIPs: A sound initiative

Abstract

Until now, mostly character-based applications were used on office computers. These applications could be accessed by visually impaired persons(VIPs) using Braille or synthetic speech. Recently, there has been a shift towards applications which require the presence of a graphical user interface (GUI). These GUIs should be adapted to facilitate collaboration between VIPs and sighted colleagues. In a different project a hardware bridge was developed to link a VIP-specific 110 device to a computer which runs the GUI-based application software [I]. Here, we focus on the SoundTablet, an I/O device which not only provides VIPs with an alternative presentation of GUI elements, but which also facilitates direct manipulation of GUI elements.