Initial design and evaluation of an interface to hypermedia systems for blind users

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Abstract
Access to information in electronic forms is currently difficult for blind people, but electronic information, particularly hypermedia, provide great potential to overcome the difficulties that blind people have in accessing information. The E.U. funded ACCESS Project is developing tools to facilitate user interfaces which will be adaptable to the needs of different user groups. One demonstrator developed with these tools is a hypermedia system for blind students. This paper presents the initial designs for the hypermedia system which has a non-visual interface named DAHNI (Demonstrator of the ACCESS Hypermedia Non-visual Interface). DAHNI can be used with a variety of assistive input/output systems for blind users. Output from the system includes synthetic and digitised speech, non-speech sounds and refreshable Braille; input to the system can be via a small or large touchtablet, joystick, and/or conventional keyboard. This paper presents an evaluation of DAHNI by seven blind and partially sighted students. Plans for further development and evaluation of the system are also discussed.

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