Capti-Speak: A speech-enabled web screen reader

People with vision impairments interact with web pages via screen readers that provide keyboard shortcuts for navigating through the content. However, web browsing with screen readers can be a frustrating experience mainly due to time and effort spent on locating the desired content through the extensive use of keyboard shortcuts. This gets even worse if users have limited shortcut vocabulary or are not familiar with the structure of a particular webpage. Augmenting screen readers with a speech input interface has the potential to alleviate the above limitations. This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of Capti-Speak, a speech-enabled screen reader for web browsing, capable of translating speech utterances into browsing actions, executing the actions, and providing audio feedback. The novelty of Capti-Speak is that it leverages a custom dialog model, designed exclusively for non-visual web access, for interpreting speech utterances. A user study with 20 blind subjects showed that Capti-Speak was significantly more usable and efficient compared to the regular screen reader, especially for ad-hoc browsing, searching, and navigating to the content of interest.