Betsie brings Web to the blind

[Brian High]

X-No-Archive: Yes

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/education/specials/bett_99/newsid_254000/25
4412.stm
Wednesday, January 13, 1999 Published at 15:14 GMT


Betsie brings Web to the blind



BBC Education has produced a new piece of software to help blind and
visually impaired people navigate the Internet.

The program is being released free as 'open source' software in the hope
that others will take it up and develop it further - asking only that if
they do so, they notify BBC Education.

The program is called Betsie - an acronym for BBC Education Text to Speech
Internet Enhancer. It is being shown off at the British Educational Training
and Technology Show (BETT) at London's Olympia.

It requires the addition of a speech synthesizer, which blind users of the
Internet will typically have.

Betsie takes heavily-formatted Internet pages and strips out the text into a
more accessible form. The developers claim it works far better than existing
programs of its type.

BBC Education's software engineer Wayne Myers says: "Standard screen-reading
software finds it difficult to detect columns of text, which means that the
vast majority of web sites, including some of our own, are effectively
inaccessible to online users with sight difficulties.

'Gibberish'

"Most sites come out like gibberish, all disjointed, with half a line here,
half a line there like some kind of random beat poetry, which isn't always
what you want. The funny thing is that the sites that do this include some
of the biggest and most popular places on the whole Web.

"Betsie effectively removes all the columns and rearranges the contents so
the most meaningful information appears at the top of the page. This gets
round the difficulties that most text-to-speech readers experience when they
come across those irritating navigation bars.

"Betsie does not alter the original site in any way, but rearranges content
on a page-by-page basis. All the hyperlinks on a Betsie-enhanced page are
altered such that they point to the Betsie-enhanced version of each page
rather than the original."

To see the Betsie version of this education section at BBC News Online,
click here.
There are limitations. The technical notes on the Betsie site say it does
not work with forms which assume JavaScript to be present and it cannot
eliminate problems with pages that contain syntactically incorrect
JavaScript. It fails on about 5% of the BBC's pages, for various reasons.

Still, the Information SuperHighways Project Manager for the Royal National
Institute for the Blind (RNIB), Mark Prouse, welcomes the development.

"RNIB applauds the work that has gone into devising Betsie. The BBC
Education site is of tremendous potential value to blind and partially
sighted people, and Betsie will certainly enable them to access it a good
deal more speedily, and with less frustration."


BBC )




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