The Practical Side of Teaching the Elderly Visually Impaired Users to Use the

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1 The Practical Side of Teaching the Elderly Visually Impaired Users to Use the Takuya Nishimoto, Masahiro Araki and Yasuhisa Niimi Department of Electronics and Information Science, Faculty of Engineering and Design, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Matsugasaki, Kyoto, , JAPAN It is important for visually impaired persons to have the opportunity to take lessons specialized for the visually impaired and novice PC users. From this viewpoint, we designed and implemented the UKK system, which guides the typing lessons with recorded sound and synthesized speech. We also investigated the usability of the popular tools that the visually impaired can use, and the Bilingual Emacspeak Platform (BEP). As a result, we found BEP is powerful and it has a good conceptual model, but one of the problems is the lack of the manual browser that the novice user can use. We also propose the manual browser of BEP, which uses the VoiceXML browser we implemented. We expect the user will browse the manuals or access to the content using speech input and output, while they use the selfvoicing Internet tools with keyboard. 1. INTRODUCTION According to the survey by the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare in 1996, there are 305,000 visually impaired persons in Japan. Those who can use Braille among them are less than 10%. Braille is not commonly used because it is especially difficult for the elderly visually impaired persons to learn Braille. On the other hand, only 1,000 blind persons can use personal computer (PC), according to the survey. It is important for visually impaired persons to use Internet with voice, which allows real-time communication and the chance of attending social activities. In recent years, Japanese Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems were available on the standard PC with audio output, though they required additional hardware. These days, there are some screen-readers for the Japanese version of Microsoft Windows, which help the visually impaired persons to access web and read or write . They are sold at low prices and do not require any additional hardware. There remains the problem, however, that the user cannot even setup and learn such systems without the help of a sighted person. There is very limited opportunity to take lessons specialized for the visually impaired and novice PC users. A non-profit organization, SCCJ, has been carrying out the Internet school for visually impaired persons in Kyoto City since May Many people including those who live in far-away places are participating in the school. From the practical side of teaching such software, the most serious problem is learning the touch-type operations of the keyboard, because many adults were not taught the typing skill during their education in Japan. In the case of sighted persons, the novice PC users can find the alphabet in the keyboard and use the computer from the beginning. The blind users, however, are forced to learn the touch-typing operations before the lessons about the PC itself, as shown in Figure 1.

2 Sighted person Visually impaired person Learning typing Learning applications Learning typing Learning applications Figure 1. If the novice PC users are sighted persons, he or she can learn touch-typing and applications simultaneously. However, if the person using the screen-reader software is visually impaired, the skill of touch-typing will be required prior to lessons of applications. To learn the touch-typing of the keyboard without another person's help, there is a need of keyboard training tools that do not use the visual display. In Japan, there has been no such software until Therefore, we designed a system that guides the typing lessons with recorded sound and synthesized speech. This software is named UKK (Uchikomi-kun). 2. DEVELOPMENT OF TYPING LESSON SOFTWARE As shown in Figure 2, the training system we designed and implemented consists of the UKK player and the UKK contents. The contents are described as the plain text files. The messages in the files are outputted with text-to-speech (TTS) engine. The contents may also include recorded sound files. We performed preliminary experiments with visually impaired persons and logged the operations of the users. As a conclusion, good results were produced in some cases, and many people said that our system is very useful. Our evaluations also showed that the poor quality of TTS engine impedes the training because the synthesized speech we used is sometimes inaudible, especially for the aged persons. For this reason, all the key-echo messages and some of the other messages were replaced in the recorded sound files. The lessons may take a very long time for the novice users, so it is important for such software to attract the user s interest. From this viewpoint, we introduced an entertainment element into the contents. In our training scenario, two characters appear and talk to the user. One is Uchikomi-kun, who has the synthesized voice and reads most of the guide messages. The other character is a calligraphy master whose name is Kakuunsai. His role is to encourage the user. Recorded sound files are used for the second character's voice, the music and the special effects. The story consists of 13 lessons, which correspond to the stories of travel from the east coast to the west coast of the USA. Professional musicians and narrators participated to make the contents.

3 Commercial UKK distribution Install program Commercial TTS Engine Other TTS Engines UKK Player: free software by KIT Commercial UKK contents (text+wav) Free UKK contents (text+wav) Figure 2. Configuration of UKK, the touch-typing training system we designed and implemented. It consists of the UKK Player software and the UKK contents including text and recorded sound files. A TTS engine is required to use the system. UKK contents are easily modified or replaced by the users. The unique feature of the system is that the contents are very easy to modify or be replaced by the users. We defined a simple notation for the system, so that the files are easy to understand. In fact, the contents of the system were written by a person who is a visually impaired and a skilled PC user, but not a software engineer. He had much experience in teaching screen-reader and Internet software to the visually impaired users, so he could turn them to his advantage in writing the contents. The system can perform not only the lessons for alphabet, but also the Roman-characters, which are used in the Japanese Input Method Editor (IME). The contents are written as the sequential commands, which are executed in order, and the event-driven commands, in which the corresponding command is performed when the specific key was pushed. The user interface is carefully designed. The complicated menu of the multiple hierarchies does not exist. All the lessons can be selected from the single menu using two-digit numbers. We found that many users were impatient to type the key to go forward or skip some messages, so we decided to make the asynchronous input and output acceptable in our system. Such functions are equivalent to the barge in attribute defined in the VoiceXML specification, which is a description language of the dialog systems [1]. This system was jointly developed with the SCCJ (NPO). The UKK player is open-source software, which is implemented with Visual Basic 6.0 and Speech API (SAPI) 4.0. We performed the evaluations of this version in December 2000 with more than 10 persons who are aged or visually impaired. Most of the testers said that our system is very unique and useful. We ware also supported by the Social Welfare and Medical Service Corporation (WAM), which is a non-profit corporation established under the supervision of the Japanese Minister of Health and Welfare. Supported by WAM, CD-ROM version of the system will be released in March EVALUATION OF SOFTWARES We also investigated how to teach the software itself. From the practical viewpoint, we evaluated the usability of two popular tools on Windows system and the Bilingual Emacspeak Platform (BEP), which is currently developed as the open-source software [2]. In the evaluation, we only used the speech output and did not use the screen. The blind users can use very few Internet software because most systems are originally designed to use the GUI. It is also said that the software originally designed for GUI has inferior usability for blind users, compared to the one designed for CUI or AUI (Auditory User Interface)[3]. In our opinion, the problem is not that what kind of UI model a software is based on. The conceptual models, the

4 consistency between the operations, the labor in operations, the burden of the short-term memory, and the design of the auditory feedback is more important for such discussion [4]. We also expect that many people will use speech recognition in the near future. It is, however, difficult for visually impaired people to use large vocabulary automatic speech recognition (LVCSR). It is because the current performance of LVCSR requires the manual correction of errors, which is very hard work without vision. We are also proposing a new application that uses LVCSR effectively [5], but we do not discuss it in this paper. There are some self-voicing tools for Windows, but they are not easy to learn. Novice users may need a tool with simple conceptual model and the functions which are limited. It is, however, important to give them the opportunity to use more powerful environment and assist them to learn the expert usage. The popular tools that the visually impaired can use, MM-Mail, WinBiff, and BEP (with Mew) were investigated. The results found MM-Mail and WinBiff had some inconsistency in operations, and the conceptual models are relatively complicated. BEP is powerful and it has a good conceptual model. The disadvantages of BEP are: 1. All the messages are in English, so the Japanese novice user has some trouble. 2. There are difficult to learn for the novice user. The first problem is related to internationalization of Emacspeak itself. The second is, there is a need of a good help-file viewer for visually impaired. There is, of course, the info browser in Emacs, but it also requires some basic skill of using Emacs itself. We are focusing on the second problem currently. 4. VOICE HELP FOR APPLICATIONS We expect the user will browse the manuals or access to the content using speech input and output, while they use the BEP or other self-voicing Internet tools with keyboard. We can use the UKK player itself as the self-voicing document browser for that purpose. However, we decided to make the browsing tool of BEP manuals based on VoiceXML 1.0. We are implementing a VoiceXML browser which runs on Windows and IBM SR/TTS engines. Using VoiceXML, finding the contents becomes much easier because we can use speech recognition. VoiceXML also makes the maintenance of the contents very easy. As the preliminary test, we asked a novice user of Emacs/Mew to use with BEP. The subject was a university student. He learned the operations of BEP using our VoiceXML based help browser without visual display. It took about 20 minutes to learn the usage of BEP, then he could read the using BEP. 5. CONCLUDING REMARKS Figure 3 shows our current works (solid line) and future works (dotted line). The UKK player will be merged into the future version of our VoiceXML player. The VoiceXML browser can use the server-side implementations of HTML (Web) or tools, so the novice user can learn typing and use the Internet with our VoiceXML browser alone. Other applications or environments for the professional such as BEP can be used with the manuals provided in VoiceXML format. The tools described in this paper will be distributed at and

5 UKK Player VoiceXML Browser BEP (Emacspeak) Emacs based Mailer & Web browser Other self-voicing softwares (Mail,Web, etc.) Typing lessons (ukk) Typing lessons (vxml) Manuals & lessons For applications (vxml) VoiceXML based internet services Mail & Web service Figure 3 shows our current works (solid line) and future works (dotted line). The novice user can learn keyboard and use the Internet with our VoiceXML browser alone. Other applications can be used with the manuals provided in VoiceXML format. REFERENCES T. Watanabe, K. Inoue, M. Sakamoto, M. Kiriake, H. Shirafuji, H. Honda, T. Nishimoto, and T. Kamae, Bilingual Emacspeak and accessibility of Linux for the visually impaired, Proceedings of Linux Conference 2000 Fall (2000) 246, (in Japanese). 3. T.V. Raman, Auditory User Interfaces -- Toward the Speaking Computer --, Kluwer Academic Publishers (1997). 4. Mary Zajicek, The construction of speech output to support elderly visually impaired users starting to use the internet, Proceedings of ICSLP2000, Volume I, pp , (2000). 5. T. Nishimoto, H. Yuki, T. Kawahara and Y. Niimi, An Asynchronous Virtual Meeting System for Bi- Directional Speech Dialog, Eurospeech 99, pp (1999).