Designing aural information architectures

ABSTRACT

Nowadays websites use, above all, the "visual channel" to communicate content, functionality and navigation/interaction capabilities. Users who, permanently or temporarily, cannot use their eyes to interact with an application (not only visuallyimpaired but also people who cannot look at the screen while interacting) need a new paradigm of interaction, based on an "aural" access to information. Current technological approaches for developing "aural hypertexts" (such as speech markup languages, or code optimization techniques for screen-readers) provide technical solutions to transform a visual interaction into an aural one, failing to support adequately the overall design process. This paper presents an overview of critical design issues to consider when conceiving aural hypertexts, namely when designing "aural" information architecture, navigation and interaction features. Examples of possible "aural" design solutions are also discussed to support specific requirements. The work is based upon real-life project experience in both designing web applications and developing applications for visually-impaired users

REFERENCES

• 1: I. V. Ramakrishnan , Amanda Stent , Guizhen Yang, Hearsay: enabling audio browsing on hypertext content, Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web, May 17-20, 2004, New York, NY, USA [doi>10.1145/988672.988684]
• 2: CSS2 Accessibility Features. Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS-access, last access 2006-03-06.
• 3: W3C. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/, last access 2006-03-04.
• 4: IT Accessibility & Workforce Division (ITAW). Available: http://www.section508.gov, last access 2006-03-06.
• 5: Signore, O. and Leporini, B. Web accessibility: principles, international context and Italian regulations. In Proceedings of CMG Italia, Conferenza annuale, Pisa, 2004.
• 6: W3C. Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines. Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-AUTOOLS/, last access 2006-03-06.
• 7: W3C. User Agent Accessibility Guidelines. Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-USERAGENT/, last access 2006-03-07.
• 8: Jaws for Windows, Freedom Scientific- Available: http://www.freedomscientific.com, last access 2006-02-27.
• 9: De Witt, J. and Hakkinen, M. Surfing the Web with pwWebSpeak. In Proceedings of Tech. and Persons with Disabilities Conference. CSUN, 1998.
• 10: James, F. Presenting HTML Structure in Audio: User Satisfaction with Audio Hypertext. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), pages. 97--103, November 1997.
• 11: W3C. VoiceXML. Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/voicexml20/, last access 2006-03-08.
• 12: Speech Application Language Tags. Available: http://saltforum.org, last access 2006-03-02.
• 13: VoiceXML Forum. Available: http://www.voicexml.org/, last access 2006-03-06.
• 14: Li, H., andYuan, B. Research on voice browsing. In Proceedings of IEEE TENCON, 2002.
• 15: Beat Signer , Moira C. Norrie , Peter Geissbuehler , Daniel Heiniger, Aural Interfaces to Databases Based on VoiceXML, Proceedings of the IFIP TC2/WG2.6 Sixth Working Conference on Visual Database Systems: Visual and Multimedia Information Management, p.235-249, May 29-31, 2002
• 16: Jun Kong, Browsing Web Through Audio, Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages - Human Centric Computing (VLHCC'04), p.279-280, September 26-29, 2004 [doi>10.1109/VLHCC.2004.9]
• 17: NetECHO. Available: http://www.internetspeech.com/, last access 2006-03-06.
• 18: Brown, M., Glinski, S. and Schmult, B., Web page analysis or voice browsing, First International Workshop on Web Document Analysis (WDA2001), Seattle, Washington, USA, September 8, 2001.
• 19: W3C. XHTML+Voice Profile 1.0. Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml+voice/, last access 2006-03-08.
• 20: SALT Forum. Available: http://www.saltforum.org/, last access 2006-03-08.
• 21: Wang, K. SALT: a spoken language interface for Web based multimodal dialog systems. In Proceedings of ICSLP-2002, Denver, CO, 2002.
• 22: Bolchini, D. and Paolini, P. Interactive Dialogue Model: a Design Technique for Multi-Channel Applications. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, to appear on June 2006 issue.
• 23: Capodieci, A., Di Blas, N., Paolini, P., Speroni, M. and Bolchini, D. Reading Web Pages to Visually Impaired People. In Proceedings of EVA 2004, Florence, 2004.
• 24: Di Blas, N., Paolini, P. and Speroni, M. Usable Accessibility to the Web for blind Users. In Proceedings of 8th ERCIM Workshop "User Interfaces for All", Vienna, Austria, 28-29 June 2004.
• 25: Di Blas, N. and Paolini, P. "There And Back Again": What Happens to Phoric Elements in a "Web Dialogue". Journal of Document Design, 4(3), 2003, pp. 194--206.
• 26: Colazzo, S., Di Blas, N., Gobbetti, D. and Paolini, P. Accessible Web Sites Can be Modelled as Aural Dialogues. In Proceedings of UAHCI 2005: 3rd International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. July 22-27, 2005, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.
• 27: The ORA Project. Available: http://ora.redirectme.net, last access 2006-03-15.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human factors

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human information processing
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications
          Subjects: Information browsers
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Standardization; Input devices and strategies (e.g., mouse, touchscreen)
      H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia
          Subjects: Architectures; User issues; Navigation

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Standardization

Keywords:
accessibility, aural hypertexts, design, interaction primitives