Electronic book interfaces for blind and partially sighted people

The paper discusses the design of electronic book interfaces from the blind or partially sighted user's viewpoint and identifies examples of good and bad practice in currently available systems. The main objectives in reading a book are the same as for a sighted person except that the eyes can move around quickly identifying structure and scope, a task which takes longer to absorb through ears and fingers. A number of currently available techniques for reading electronic books are described. Shortfalls in the interfaces and software are discussed and a number of conclusions are drawn. It is important for people to obtain an overall feel for the layout and organisation of the text. Exploiting mark-up languages that offer orientating features such as titles or bold text can be used as a signal to a speech device to change its pitch from that which it uses for ordinary text. Special attention is given to the problems of accessing books that embed graphical user-interfaces, for example dialogue.