Supporting Conveyance of Webpages by Highlighting Text for Visually Impaired Persons.

Visually impaired people employ various tools to understand the contents of webpages. Some studies have tried to convey non-text elements in webpages using vibration or mechanical towing. Because these studies require extra tools for users to understand webpages, many users have difficulty using these tools. Visually impaired people often use a screen reader to read webpages, but emphasis expressions in the texts are not conveyed or they are only conveyed as text contexts. This means that visually impaired people may not fully understand the intended contents of the webpage. To address this issue, herein we propose a method that changes the reading method based on the emphasis expressions in the text. Our method conveys emphasis expressions such as bold characters by changing four voice parameters (pitch, volume, reading rate, and silence time). Our method has the effect of increasing the recognition rate of the emphasized part and improving the understanding of webpage contents.