Making multimedia content accessible for screen reader users

Abstract

Rich and multimedia content is increasing rapidly on the Web. It is very attractive for sighted people, but it brings severe problems to screen reader users. Once the audio starts playing, it becomes hard for blind users to listen to the screen reader because there is physically only one volume control that cannot control the separate audio streams. Though there are often software-controlled buttons to control the audio, they are often controllable only with a mouse and are not associated with alternative text. Because of the audio conflicts and inaccessible control buttons, the multimedia content is often inaccessible to blind users. In addition, the use of dynamically changing interactive user interfaces is also a critical issue, since existing screen readers cannot detect such dynamic content changes. We developed an accessible Internet browser for multimedia to address these problems and offer multimedia content as an information resource for the blind. It is characterized by three major features. First, it allows users to control the audio, such as the volume, play/stop, pause, and even the speed. Second, a dynamically adaptable metadata function is added to simplify complicated multimedia pages and to track dynamic changes and effectively inform users about the changes. Third, an audio description function supports Internet movies with a text format described by the metadata. In this paper, after briefly discussing the existing accessibility problems of multimedia content, we describe our accessible Internet browser for multimedia. Copyright 2007 ACM.