Changes in Reading Voice to Convey Design Intention for Users with Visual Impairment

Abstract

Webpage texts are often emphasized by decorations such as bold, italic, underline, and text color using HTML (HyperText Markup Language) tags and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). However, users with visual impairment often struggle to recognize decorations appropriately because most screen readers do not read decorations appropriately. To overcome this limitation, we propose a method to read emphasized texts by changing the reading voice parameters of a screen reader and adding sound effects. First, the strong emphasis types and reading voices are investigated. Second, the intensity of the emphasis type is used to calculate a score. Then the score is used to assign the reading method for the emphasized text. Finally, the proposed method is evaluated by users with and without visual impairment. The proposed method can convey emphasized texts, but future improvements are necessary.