Anikto LLC

Virtual Worlds User Interface for the Blind

The research division of IBM known as alphaWorks has released an emerging technology that appears to be very promising. A prototype has been developed to offer users with vision disabilities an opportunity to experience virtual world technology.

Virtual World User Interface for the Blind is what’s known as an accessible rich Internet application (ARIA), providing navigation and communication functionality via user interface elements and virtual objects tagged with semantic data. Annotations are applied by sighted users, which are then picked up by screen readers through non-pictorial text-based descriptions.

Most impressive, I think, is how thin the client is. Users of Second Life know what a beast that downloaded executable can be, so this strikes me as very good progress:

The user interface is a Web application, a thin client running locally in the Firefox browser that communicates with Second Life through an agent on our server. The application is implemented partly with the JavaScript programming language, and it uses Dojo Toolkit widgets to provide a virtual world user interface that is entirely keyboard-navigable and screen reader-friendly. Nothing is permanently installed on the user’s computer.

The interface prototype is currently available only for Second Life; however, the long-term goal is to create enough extensibility so that the application can be made to work with newer platforms as they are introduced. The software is not intended to be bug-free at this time, being an emerging product, but I’m encouraged by recent trends to include people with disabilities in the virtual experience.