User interface of a nonvisual table navigation method

Abstract

It is fervently hoped that the World Wide Web will become a new information resource for the blind. However, although the use of tables on the Web has been increasing, the currently available talking Web browsers basically read tables horizontally, making it very hard for blind users to understand them. We therefore propose a method that allows users to navigate through a table both horizontally and vertically. Our method is characterized by three features: a table cursor, a table pointer, and a cell-jumping key. In this paper, we describe the user interface of our method, report the results of our evaluation tests, and offer some conclusions.