The hypertext system AUDIS is primarily developed to provide comfortable accessibility to textbooks for visually impaired students. It maximally pays attention to the special needs of users and allows for comfortable customization. The system is supported by the utilities for text conversion and rendering. Next versions of AUDIS will allow the system to be used as World Wide Web browser as well.

Even though AUDIS is primarily developed for visually impaired people, the architecture of the system is designed in such a way that the system will be convenient even to a larger group of people with special needs, e.g. for print impaired people.

The user controls the system by means of speech commands combined with keyboard key commands. This access optimizes the effectiveness of the control by joining advantages of both methods. Every command exists in both versions, i.e. in speech command version and in keyboard key version. This is due to possible application of the system for print impaired people.

Speech commands consist of the key words and are recognized by built-in speech recognizer. The system enables customization of the commands by renaming key words or by defining alternatives.

Here we present the basic principles on which the system is built from the user point of view.

• The system enables comfortable control by means of combination of speech commands and hot-key commands. Speech commands are supported by speech command thesaurus that allows to express a command in several ways, making the control of the system more intuitive.
• Easy customization and configuration are important features of the system. This is related to the control commands, mode and type of speech synthesis output, graphic output for print impaired people with sight, information data structure, and other properties and options of the system.
• It is important to enable the user to obtain the information quickly and to get always an informational overview. This is supported first by various output speech modes and output speech rates, second by speech summaries, audio glances, earcons and environmental sounds.
• The orientation of the user is supported by the information about the position that is always accessible in speech form as well as in the form of audio glances, earcons and environmental sounds.
• User’s speech remarks can be assigned to each information unit (menu, chapter, section, sentence). Each information unit can be underlined or masked. The user and system information attributes (masking, underlining, speech mode and voice types etc.) are always saved and can be always reset.
• The system is provided with tree, linear and fulltext type of searching and with the database of speech bookmarks. Summaries of the related information unit are always associated to a bookmark and can be used for orientation.
• Control of the speech output is fully supported. Each information unit can be skipped or repeated, the speech output can be stopped, speeded up or slowed down.

Head of the Project

Ivan Kopecek

Faculty of Informatics, Botanicka 68a,

60200 Brno, Czech Republic

Team (in alphabetical ordering)

Ludek Bartek, Robert Batusek, Ivan Kopecek