108 results about "Screen reading" patented technology

A method and apparatus for definition links for online documentation is provided. According to one aspect of the invention, the definition links for online documentation provide a non-sighted or visually impaired user employing a screen reading utility a method to select a definition link from an online document which in turn navigates the user to a corresponding link definition area of the online document. Once the user has finished reading the definition, the user can easily be navigated back to the original text area of the document. In one embodiment, the definition links for online documentation provides footnote information. In one embodiment, a method of accessing footnote links and corresponding footnote definitions is provided. The embodiments contained herein for definition links for online documentation adhere to United States Federal Section 508 guidelines for accessibility standards.

User interaction of a visually displayed document is provided via a graphical user interface (GUI). The document includes, and is parsed into, a plurality of text-based grammatical units. An input device modality is selected from a plurality of input device modalities which determines the type of input device in which a user interacts with to make a selection. One or more grammatical units of the document are then selected using the selected type of input device. Each grammatical unit that is selected is read aloud to the user by loading the grammatical unit into a text-to-speech engine. The text of the grammatical unit is thereby automatically spoken. Furthermore, a switching modality is selected from a plurality of switching modalities. The switching modality determines the manner in which one or more switches are used to make a selection. Using the selected switching modality, a user steps through at least some of the grammatical units in an ordered manner by physically activating one or more switches associated with the GUI. Each activation steps through one grammatical unit. Each grammatical unit that is stepped through is read aloud by loading the grammatical unit into a text-to-speech engine, thereby causing the text of the grammatical unit to be automatically spoken.

One aspect of the present invention includes adaptive techniques used to render dynamic web content for accessibility software applications, such as screen readers. In one embodiment, an operation for improving webpage browsing with accessibility software includes detecting if an accessibility software application is in use, tracking the position of user focus on the webpage, and presenting information to the user based on the position of user focus on the webpage. In a further embodiment, additional content is rendered on the webpage to screen reader applications, and is placed at the position of the screen reader focus in response to dynamic content appearing or changing on the webpage. This additional content is read by the screen reader to inform the user of the dynamic content change, and / or enable the user to quickly perform a specific action on the webpage.

The present disclosure relates to screenreader techniques and volume control techniques for electronic devices. In some embodiments, a device displays a plurality of user interface objects in an ordered progression. A rotation of a rotary input mechanism is detected. In response to the rotation of the rotary input mechanism, if a rotary screenreader navigation mode is activated, a visual highlight is displayed and an auditory output is produced. In some embodiments, a device has a volume setting. A gesture is detected, and a volume adjustment mode is activated. The gesture ends with a contact being maintained, and the volume setting is adjusted in accordance with detected movement of the contact.

A method for repeatable application testing on a computer system for audible output generated by the application in conjunction with a screen reader or similar assistive technology. The method includes recording user inputs to a user application using a test input component. The user inputs are also accessed by a screen reader input component. Outputs of the user application are recorded using a test output component. The outputs of the user application are also accessed by a screen reader output component. The resulting screen reader outputs are recorded and are analyzed with respect to the recorded user inputs and the recorded outputs of the user application. The user inputs to the user application can be keyboard inputs or mouse inputs, and inputs of other input devices. The outputs of the user application can be graphical outputs or alphanumeric outputs for a display of the computer system. The resulting screen reader outputs can be sound output signals (or representations thereof) for a sound system of the computer system.

A method and system that provide a central repository for client specific accessibility applications to a user from an accessible server. The repository is updated on a periodic basis with new solutions provided by the service provider, who also manages licensing agreements between the user and the owner of the accessibility application. Accessibility programs, such as page magnification, screen readers, background changes, input modification, etc., are downloaded into the client device being used by the user customer by clicking link buttons from a web page generated by the service provider's server. The accessibility programs downloaded are then resident on the client device until changed by the user. In a preferred embodiment, the service provider also provides a universal transcoding service to apply the user selected accessibility transformations to any type of client device used by the user.

A system for providing DHTML (“Dynamic Hyper-Text Markup Language”) accessibility. Rich keyboard and other assistive technology (“AT”) accessibility is provided for sophisticated Web applications. When a user downloads a Web page, the system performs initialization that includes loading at least one display object, and binding the object to a predetermined event, such as, for example, a focus event. The event the object is bound to may be any semantic, device independent event. The disclosed system may also load a device handling function, such as a keyboard handling function. The device handling function associates one or more display objects with corresponding device actions, such as key presses. A keyboard handling function may operate to intercept at least one key press, and determine that an intercepted key press matches a key press corresponding to a previously loaded display object. The device handling function may create a focus event for the previously loaded display object, and post the event to the display object. The display object then handles the event by visually responding to the intercepted key press, for example by changing the visual representation of the display object to be highlighted, or to otherwise indicate that the display object has been selected. The event may then also be sent to an assistive technology program, such as a screen reader program. Using the values of attributes in that display object, such as the value of the role attribute, the assistive technology program responds to the event as appropriate.

The invention discloses a touch screen-based rotary type continuous speed changing browsing and searching method, belonging to the information technical field; with the method, a user can make continuous operations in the limited ranged of the touch screen, achieving the control on an object in an approximate limitless range. When the user continuously draws circles on the touch screen in the rotary mode, the sliding speed and the sliding direction can be respectively calculated and judged by collecting sampling points on a reading device touch screen of the touch screen; based on the sliding speed and the sliding direction, the object elements can be continuously scrolled at different browsing speeds and in the positive and the negative directions; thereby the invention has the advantages of simple and flexible operation, fast browsing speed and space save, and is not restricted by the clockwise or the counter clockwise circle-drawing directions; moreover, the invention realizes the function that the object contents can be continuously scrolled in the positive direction and the negative direction in a relatively small touch screen without need of raising a pen by the user, thereby enhancing the applicability of hand-held reading devices; the invention can be widely applied to all touch screen reading device for searching different contents.

A screen reader application for visually impaired users suppresses unwanted content that is output by Braille or text-to-speech. The invention accesses, but does not modify, the document object model of the web page and enumerates web page elements for the end user to either hide or skip to. The end user selections are saved as rules which may be applied according to various levels of scope include web page specific, site specific or web-wide. A screen magnification application for visually impaired users automatically sets the visual focus and magnification level on a web page element according to end-user selection.

A method, system, and computer program product is disclosed for customizing a synthesized voice based upon audible input voice data. The input voice data is typically in the form of one or more predetermined paragraphs being read into a voice recorder. The input voice data is then analyzed for adjustable voice characteristics to determine basic voice qualities (e.g., pitch, breathiness, tone, speed; variability of any of these qualities, etc.) and to identify any “specialized speech patterns”. Based upon this analysis, the characteristics of the voice utilized to read text appearing on the screen are modified to resemble the input voice data. This allows a user of the system to easily and automatically create a voice that is familiar to the user.

A screen reader software product feature referred to as a custom summary view, or custom summary, has been developed. The custom summary feature solves the major problem faced by blind users when working with large sets of data. That problem occurs as a result of an inefficiency of gleaning important data from within these larger sets. The custom summary provides the ability to gather such data into a summary that can be navigated easily. This ease of navigation greatly levels the playing field in the competitive workplace for blind workers and students alike. Also taught is a feature, referred to as a multiple region support, which allows users to define blocks of contiguous cells containing data as “regions” when a document such as a spreadsheet is displayed by a screen reader. Regions can either be named by the user or be defined simply by the top left and bottom right cell addresses that represent the boundaries of the block of contiguous cells containing data.

A system for providing a fully accessible color selection component in a graphical user interface, in which multiple selectable colors are represented using a set of selectable color name display regions, each of which includes a text name for a color and has a background color made up of the selectable color. Additionally, and external to the color name display regions, the disclosed system provides a sample color display region made up of a currently selected color. The background colors in the color name display regions reduce ambiguity in normal display settings by showing the user samples of colors that can be selected. The sample color display region supports high contrast settings that are likely to be used by low vision users. When a user has a high contrast setting selected, the background colors in the color name display regions may not be displayed, and accordingly the color name display regions may only display textual names. However, by providing an image of a currently selected color in the sample color display region, the actual color that is currently selected is still displayed, since images are typically not modified by high contrast settings, which may be useful when selecting a color for an off-screen application. The disclosed system can be implemented using an HTML <select> component. A screen reader program can also be used to speak the color names for each color name display region, and the user does not hear any redundant information about the currently selected color.

A browser, with a web page screen-reading function, displays a web page easy to read in synchronism with text screen-reading is possible. The browser determines whether lateral scroll during normal page displaying is occurred reduces, if occurred, the width of displayed component of the display page below the width of the display area and displays the component to be displayed within reduced area to reconstruct the layout of page. The browser, thus, conducts the reconstructed page displayed and vertical scroll so that the character string corresponding to the screen-read part aurally outputted can be displayed.

A method and apparatus for reading a web page according to a set of user-configurable settings. In one embodiment, a set of user-configurable settings configured for reading the web page is determined. An initial reading position on the web page is determined as specified by the user-configurable settings. The web page is then read from the initial reading position according to the set of user-configurable settings.

A speech-generating product for controlling the output of tabular or other composite data in a computer having a screen reader function. The product provides a customized control presentation tool that configures a screen reader to present tabular or other composite data to a user in the order most useful to the user. The tool includes the ability to configure the screen reader independently for both speech and Braille output on a control by control basis. This customized control presentation is saved in permanent storage. Consequently, each time the screen reader is presented with this instance of the control, the screen reader immediately knows how to present it to the user. The software product allows a user to modify the output by the screen reader of the data according to preferences configurable by the user. These preferences may include the ability to skip display information, to specify the order in which the screen reader presents the display information and the ability to alter the headers associated with the display information. By altering the headers the user may annotate the headers to provide additional information about the underlying data. The headers may also be output in an alternative voice by a speech synthesizer to queue a user to a change of information. The user may also specify that certain display information is sent by the screen reader to one display device while other display information is sent to an alternative display device.

Systems and method for dynamically loaded menus and objects are provided that can provide cross-platform capability and accessibility features. Objects in a page that are dynamic or are not human-readable (e.g., executable or images) can be identified and enhanced for compatibility with screen readers. HTML corresponding to the object can be generated and loaded in storage for use within the web page. The loaded HTML can be copied into the HTML of the web page. A blank placeholder may be displayed in the area in which the corresponding HTML is to be displayed and the corresponding HTML is displayed over the placeholder to provide a replacement object such as to display a list of URL menu items.

A system and method for creating and accessing an object in a computer system is disclosed. The computer system including an application and an operating system. The system and method comprises a plurality of application programming interfaces (APIs) calls in the operating system. The plurality of API calls being utilized to obtain and set state information related to the application. The system further comprises a record / playback application on the computer, the record / playback application being capable of generating and reading script based upon the API calls to record actions that represent the operations of the applications and to reply actions that represent operations of the application. A system and method in accordance with the present invention utilizes existing accessibility screen reader technologies in order to create automated script files to launch program events. This can be accomplished by capturing the actions that the user's mouse and keyboard events create during of launching of a program or application including, mouse clicks, commands, pull down menu selections, etc., by utilizing API calls to retrieve state information concerning the program application.

A screen reader application for visually impaired users suppresses unwanted content that is output by Braille or text-to-speech. The invention accesses, but does not modify, the document object model of the web page and enumerates web page elements for the end user to either hide or skip to. The end user selections are saved as rules which may be applied according to various levels of scope include web page specific, site specific or web-wide. A screen magnification application for visually impaired users automatically sets the visual focus and magnification level on a web page element according to end-user selection.

A screen reader software product including a pattern store containing at least one user-definable array of keywords relating to a subject of interest and skim reading module adapted to apply the at least one array of keywords to a target document whereby only portions of the target document matching the at least one array of keywords are output by the screen reader software to an end user.

The invention relates to the technical field of computers, and discloses ink screen reading equipment, a screen driving method thereof and a storage medium. The method comprises: acquiring the currenttemperature of the ink screen; Judging whether the current temperature is smaller than a preset first temperature value or not; If yes, determining a second temperature value, determining a driving waveform of the ink screen in an LUT table according to the second temperature value and the gray value of the to-be-displayed content, wherein the second temperature value is larger than or equal to the first temperature value; Otherwise, according to the current temperature and the gray value of the to-be-displayed content in the LUT table, looking up the table to determine the driving waveform of the ink screen; And driving the ink screen to display the content to be displayed by using the driving waveform determined by table lookup. According to the embodiment of the invention, the drivingwaveform with shorter refresh time can be obtained, so that the refresh speed is increased.

The invention relates to a barrier-free webpage control method. The barrier-free webpage control method adopts the following devices: a preset webpage locating device for locating a focus of a webpage opened by a browser, a color control device, a link labeling device, a scaling device, an auxiliary line device and a webpage title deice. According to a barrier-free webpage control device, the focus is enabled be located automatically to a required webpage control through shortcut key location or program control, and the purpose that a screen reading user acquires information at the webpage focus in a barrier-free manner can be achieved; rapid switching between part of important zones in a webpage can be realized instead of switching between links one by one; by means of adjustment of the webpage, content and color of the page as well as the auxiliary line function, the requirement for information acquisition by visual impairment people with low vision, amblyopia, dyschromatopsia and the like is met, and the convenience in operation by the disabled is improved.

The present disclosure relates to screenreader techniques and volume control techniques for electronic devices. In some embodiments, a device displays a plurality of user interface objects in an ordered progression. A rotation of a rotary input mechanism is detected. In response to the rotation of the rotary input mechanism, if a rotary screenreader navigation mode is activated, a visual highlight is displayed and an auditory output is produced. In some embodiments, a device has a volume setting. A gesture is detected, and a volume adjustment mode is activated. The gesture ends with a contact being maintained, and the volume setting is adjusted in accordance with detected movement of the contact.

The invention provides an intelligent warehouse cargo management method adopting an RFID technology. The method is characterized in that steps are: firstly, implanting an RFID label for each cargo respectively, registering a different ID for each RFID label and distributing a storage space for each ID in a database server; then both after the cargos undergo warehousing registration and warehousing, and when the cargos are undergoing ex-warehouse registration and cargo packing, adopting a mobile RFID reader-writer to read the RFID label on each cargo and obtaining the IDs of the RFIDs and inputting related information of the cargos and sending the data to the database server for storage through a management system. The advantages of the intelligent warehouse cargo management method adopting the RFID technology are: (1): rapid scanning; (2) penetrability and no-screen reading; (3) anti-pollution capability and durability; (4) large memory capacity of the data; (5) volume miniaturization and shape diversification; (6) reusability; (7) security.

The invention discloses a read-write method and a read-write device of a dot matrix type liquid crystal display (LCD). The read-write method includes the steps of dividing the LCD into a preset number of display areas, allocating a different number to each area, marking the position coordinate of each pixel point in each display area and the pixel range of each display area, calculating the storage capacity of a video memory corresponding to each display area according to the pixel range of the display area, arranging a buffer storage area with a size corresponding to the storage capacity on a buffer area, and utilizing video memory data corresponding to each display area to renew the content of the buffer storage area. Through utilizing the read-write method and the read-write device of the dot matrix type LCD and combining the advantages of full-screen reading and writing and reading and writing according to bytes, storage resources of the buffer area are saved and reaction speed is fast. Especially when frequent read-write operation is carried out, the read-write method and the read-write device of the dot matrix type LCD are high in efficiency.

The invention provides a coded lock and a control system and method of the coded lock, and belongs to the field of coded locks. The control system of the coded lock comprises a user terminal and the coded lock, wherein the user terminal comprises a display screen, and has a unique identification code. The coded lock comprises a screen reading system and a decoding system. The user terminal is used for generating a dynamic unlocking password according to the current time and generating a grid image according to the unlocking password, and the grid image comprises a plurality of grids; the coded lock is used for obtaining an unlocking password according to collected state information of the plurality of grids, and decoding the unlocking password to obtain decoding data; a corresponding electronic lock is opened when the decoding data pass through verification. According to the invention, the dynamic password encrypted lock is used, so that the safety performance of the coded lock is effectively improved; the data transmission between the user terminal and the coded lock is realized by utilizing optical signals, so that the process for a user to input the password is simpler and more convenient.

The invention relates to a rearrangement method for performing adaptive screen reading on print media image. The method comprises the following steps of (1) respectively performing noise removing, watermark removing or inclination correction preprocessing on a print media image which contains noise and watermark or inclination; (2) performing text / graphic separation process on the text-graphic mixed print media image; (3) performing trimming process on the non-text content part of the print media image including headers, footers or titles; and (4) performing separation rearrangement process on the context image according to the target screen resolution, and separating the text image into the image with the screen width. The method provided by the invention is reasonable in design; the requirement of adaptive display for handheld moving equipment or large-screen display equipment with different resolutions can be satisfied without identifying the text; and meanwhile, the problem of reading cartoons through the handheld moving equipment is solved through automatically identifying the frames of the cartoons and separating the cartoons into single cartoon, thus, the method has the characteristics of high accuracy, simple method, high efficiency and the like.

The present invention discloses a voice control system based on a voice mouse. The system comprises a voice mouse and a local computer that are connected by means of a USB bus; the voice mouse comprises a voice acquisition module, a switch control module, a data pre-processing module and a mouse USB interface; and the local computer comprises a computer USB interface, a local voice recognition engine, a local command thesaurus, a command execution module, an automatic screen-reading module, a voice synthesis module and a voice playback module. The voice control system provided by the present invention controls the operating mode of the system by means of the switch control module, acquires a user manual operation command by means of the mouse control module, acquires a user voice command by means of the voice acquisition module, identifies the voice data by using the local voice recognition engine to realize voice control, and automatically reads operating information of a current screen by means of the automatic screen reading module to carry out voice broadcasting, so that the system is convenient in operation and high in accuracy, and greatly facilitates computer operation of the blind.

The simple gesture control of the user interface can be used by visually impaired or blind people in order to enter telephone numbers or account numbers for example. The user interface and the method constitute a shift from the current paradigm of guiding a user on touchscreens, which has precisely the advantage of the hand-eye coordination allowed by the touchscreen, wherein a user touches the exact location on the touchscreen where a corresponding selection surface is visualized. Instead, a swiping gesture is supported which can be carried out in any region on the touch-sensitive surface and shifts the focus from one selection surface or virtual button to the next. The swiping gesture can be carried out not just in the horizontal and vertical direction but also in a diagonal direction. Diagonal swiping gestures allow a particularly quick selection of the corresponding virtual buttons. Because multiple swiping gestures can be carried out one after the other, the selection of the virtual button can be modified as often as desired. This has the advantage that a user can first explore the user interface before actually entering a character or activating a function. Each selected virtual button is read to the user by means of a screenreader functionality. The method can be implemented on conventional existing hardware, and the user interface is designed in accordance with reliable and user-centered policies.

Embodiments of the present invention address deficiencies of the art in respect to screen reading non-sequential text and provide a method, system and computer program product for overlapping screen reading of non-sequential text, such as a tag cloud or Web page header. In an embodiment of the invention, an overlapping screen reading method for a non-sequential list of words can include computing different speech synthesis parameters for different words in a non-sequential list of words, generating different audio forms for each of the different words according to the different speech synthesis parameters, and overlappingly merging the generated different audio forms into a single audio stream. The speech synthesis parameters can include, for instance, separation, volume, tone and location speech synthesis parameters. Thereafter, the method can include playing back the single audio stream to simulate a natural visual scanning of the non-sequential list of words.