Hearsay: A Context-Driven Assistant Browser for Non-Visual Web Access

This project will engineer and implement Hearsay,-a context driven, non-visual web browser that will enable visually impaired users to browse efficiently and perform transactions on the web, allowing them to participate fully in growing web-based economy activities for education, commerce, health care in the community. Hearsay will combat the information overload problem experienced by individuals with visual impairments when using extant screen-readers, which read web pages sequentially to users. Rather than having to wade through enormous amounts of unnecessary information irrelevant to the task at hand, Hearsay users will be presented with page content in the order of most relevant first. Hearsay will also provide special support for users performing transactions on the web, such as purchasing items, paying bills, or registering for services. Furthermore, for repetitive browsing tasks, Hearsay will let users create and retrieve personalized content. Hearsay will be an architect to support an increasing sophistication of semantic content processing and to provide easy incorporation of third-party voice generators and I/O devices. Using a variety of techniques, Hearsay will analyze and organize page content semantically from processing local link contexts, through shallow knowledge bases of relevant concepts, to automated construction of transaction models. Charmtech identifies the proposed system as having the potential to revolutionize how individuals with visual impairments participate in the web market place by providing a much more usable and personalized browser experience. Current assistive technologies are marketed by direct sales to individuals with disabilities, requiring them to pay for services that the general population receives for free. By reaching one tenth of the population with visual impairments, the system could potentially impact one million individuals. Projecting from the average online behavior of the sighted population, this system could possibly generate an additional five billion in online sales. Charmtech suggests that this market potential will provide the leverage to distribute Hearsay free of charge to users by following free software models, such as Mozilla Firefox and Wikipedia, leverage open source development communities and offer a significantly higher market penetration than possible with proprietary software.