서버 기반 웹 리더 kWebAnywhere의 설계 및 구현

Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of the kWebAnywhere system based on WebAnywhere, which assists people with severely diminished eye sight and the blind people to access Internet information through Web interfaces. The WebAnywhere is a server-based web reader which reads aloud the web contents using TTS(text-to-speech) technology on the Internet without installing any software on the client’s system. The system can be used in general web browsers using a built-in audio function, for blind users who are unable to afford to use a screen reader and for web developers to design web accessibility. However, the WebAnywhere is limited to supporting only a single language and cannot be applied to Korean web contents directly. Thus, in this paper, we modified the WebAnywhere to serve multiple language contents written in both English and Korean texts. The modified WebAnywhere system is called kWebAnywhere to differentiate it with the original system. The kWebAnywhere system is modified to support the Korean TTS system, VoiceTextTM, and to include user interface to control the parameters of the TTS system. Because the VoiceTextTM system does not support the Festival API used in the WebAnywhere, we developed the Festival Wrapper to transform the VoiceTextTM’s private APIs to the Festival APIs in order to communicate with the WebAnywhere engine. We expect that the developed system can help people with severely diminished eye sight and the blind people to access the internet contents easily.