Tools to give the Internet a voice

Speech recognition and speech synthesis can improve accessibility for visually impaired users and reduce problems caused by current GUI interfaces. In this paper some tools that were designed and developed in the project "Information technologies for blind people" carried out by the Institute for Educational Technology of Palermo are presented. The main aim of the project is to define and develop a system to support blind and visually impaired people in using information and communication tools with particular regard to educational purposes. Within this framework we have developed a set of vocal tools: the VocalSe@rch a meta-search engine, a browser, Internet chat and email. The main functionalities of these tools are: keyword search for blind users on the Internet, vocal chat on the Internet, vocal e-mail service, speak rate management, vocal on-line help, synthesis language selection, environmental personalization, auto software upgrade, pause/resume tool to interrupt and restart the synthesis process, sequential sentence synthesis thus allowing the user to navigate a text so s/he can listen or re-listen to specific words or phrases. The design of the vocal tools and framework architecture are presented . Some findings are also reported.