ASSETS 2009 - Approaches to Locating Areas of Interest Related to Questions in a Document for Non-Visual Readers

Approaches to Locating Areas of Interest Related to Questions in a Document for Non-Visual Readers

Debra Yarrington and Kathleen McCoy

Eleventh International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility - Posters and Demos (ASSETS 2009)
Pittsburgh, PA, USA, October 26-28, 2009

Summary

In this paper we will describe an approach to creating a tool to aid blind, low-vision, dyslexic, and other non-visual readers in skimming a document to answer questions. The goal is to give them information similar to that obtained by a visual reader's skimming experience. Towards this goal, we examine approaches to locating areas of interest within a document that are related to a question. The areas of interest in relation to a question were determined through user studies in which visual readers skimmed through documents for answers to questions while being tracked by an eye tracking system. We then examined methods of automatically identifying the areas of interest using keywords related to the content of the question. This poster focuses on the effectiveness of these different methods in identifying the areas of interest.