Towards More Efficient Screen Reader Web Access with Automatic Summary Generation and Text Tagging

Readers with 20/20 vision can easily read text and quickly perceive information to get an overview of the information within a text. This is more challenging for readers who rely on screen readers. This study investigated fac-tors affecting successful screen reading in order to shed light on what contributes towards the improvement of screen reading access. Text extraction, summariza-tion, and representation techniques were explored. The goal of this work leads to the development of a new summarization technique, referred to as On Demand Summary Generation and Text Tagging (ODSG&TT). This technique makes use of a summarization algorithm and a text tagging algorithm developed by Algo-rithmia, which enables on the fly and on-demand summarization of text and key-word generation. The focus of the screen reader is transferred to the keywords using a button control. The intention is to provide summaries with minimum user navigation effort to simplify the screen reading process.