A Haptic Rendering Engine of Web Pages for Blind Users

To overcome the shortcomings posed by audio rendering of web pages for blind users, this paper implements an interaction technique where web pages are parsed so as to automatically generate a virtual reality scene that is augmented with a haptic feedback. All elements of a web page are transformed into a corresponding “hapget” (haptically-enhanced widget), a three dimensional widget exhibiting a behavior that is consistent with their web counterpart and having haptic extension governed by usability guidelines for haptic interaction. A set of implemented hapgets is described and used in some examples. All hapgets introduced an extension to UsiXML, a XML-compliant User Interface Description Language that fosters model-driven engineering of user interfaces. In this way, it possible to render any UsiXML-compatible user interface thanks to the interaction technique described, and not only web pages.