Blind Browser Using Web Extraction

Computer Engineering

Over the years, the World Wide Web (WWW) has been an excellent medium for a number of benefits of mankind. It has facilitated communication between people located in any part of the world. It has provided access to unlimited information in various formats. Apart from a number of services, numerous kinds of entertainment factors can also be found on the Web. Though all these facilities have been extremely profitable to mankind, sadly, the visually handicapped people face great difficulties in accessing these benefits. Web browsers for the visually handicapped people in the past have been limited to converting documents to Braille or speech, or extracting text and filtering. However, the human aspects of web surfing for blind people have not been adequately addressed. This paper presents an architecture of an open source, light weight web browser that makes it easy for the visually handicapped people to surf the web. The proposed architecture allows a blind person to navigate any web content through simple speech commands and voice feedback to any keyboard operation. The browser will have an integrated text extraction engine that inspects the content of the page to construct a structured representation. The internal nodes of the structure represent various levels of abstraction of the content.

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