Communicating Text Structure to Blind People with Text-to-Speech

Sorin, Laurent; Lemarié, Julie; Aussenac-Gilles, Nathalie; Mojahid, Mustapha; Oriola, Bernard

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-08596-8_10

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Part of this research works to improve the access to documents content, in particular graphs [7], diagrams [27] and tables [21]. Only a few, as [17] or [26], have specialized in taking into account page layout and typographical effects; this dimension is too often evacuated despite its linguistic and cognitive interest. As [16], some approach aims to go further in exploiting the visual structure of document.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Concurrent Speech Synthesis to Improve Document First Glance for the Blind

Maurel

Dias

Ferrari

et al. 2019

2019 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition Workshops (ICDARW)

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Skimming and scanning are two well-known reading processes, which are combined to access the document content as quickly and efficiently as possible. While both are available in visual reading mode, it is rather difficult to use them in non visual environments because they mainly rely on typographical and layout properties. In this article, we introduce the concept of tag thunder as a way (1) to achieve the oral transposition of the web 2.0 concept of tag cloud and (2) to produce an innovative interactive stimulus to observe the emergence of self-adapted strategies for non-visual skimming of written texts. We first present our general and theoretical approach to the problem of both fast, global and non-visual access to web browsing; then we detail the progress of development and evaluation of the various components that make up our software architecture. We start from the hypothesis that the semantics of the visual architecture of web pages can be transposed into new sensory modalities thanks to three main steps (web page segmentation, keywords extraction and sound spatialization). We note the difficulty of simultaneously (1) evaluating a modular system as a whole at the end of the processing chain and (2) identifying at the level of each software brick the exact origin of its limits; despite this issue, the results of the first evaluation campaign seem promising.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Concurrent Speech Synthesis to Improve Document First Glance for the Blind

Maurel

Dias

Ferrari

et al. 2019

2019 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition Workshops (ICDARW)

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“…Existing solutions for non-visual web page browsing often use Text-To-Speech (TTS) and Braille mode. Text-To-Speech has been used to convey document structure to users in non-visual situations via the content vocalization [5,6]. To increase TTS efficiency, [7] proposed an oral transposition model based on layout reformulation 1 Image by Anand S, https://flic.kr/p/5BFE3V, CC-BY-2.0 strategies.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tag Thunder: Web Page Skimming in Non Visual Environment Using Concurrent Speech

Lecarpentier

Manishina

Ferrari³

et al. 2016

7th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT 2016)

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Skimming and scanning are two strategies generally used for speed reading. Skimming allows a reader to get a first glance of a document; scanning is the process of searching for a specific piece of information in a document. While both techniques are available in visual reading mode, it is rather difficult to use them in non visual environments. In this paper, we introduce the concept of tag thunder, which provides speed reading non-visual techniques similar to skimming and scanning. A tag thunder is the oral transposition of the tag cloud concept. Tag cloud key terms are presented using typographic effects which reflect their relevance and number of occurrences. Within a tag thunder, the relevance of a given key term is translated into specific speech effects and its position on the page is reflected in the position of the corresponding sound on a 2D stereo space. All key terms of a tag thunder are output according to a concurrent speech strategy, which exploits the cocktail party effect. In this paper, we present our implementation of the tag thunder concept. The results of the evaluation campaign show that tag thunders present a viable non-visual alternative to visual speed reading strategies.

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