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