SoundGlance: Briefing the Glanceable Cues of Web Pages for Screen Reader Users

Screen readers have become a core assistive technology for blind web users to browse web pages. Although screen readers can convey the textual information or structural properties of web pages, they cannot deliver their overall impression. Such a limitation hinders blind web users from obtaining an overview of the website, which non-blind people can do in a short time. As such, we present SoundGlance, a novel application that briefly delivers an auditory summary of web pages. SoundGlance supports the screen reader users by converting the important glanceable cues of the pages into sound. The feasibility of prototype was examined in a pilot study with fourteen blind people. Several practical insights were derived from the experiment.