IBM Accessibility Internet Browser for Multimedia (aiBrowser)

The IBM Accessibility Internet Browser for Multimedia (aiBrowser) is an Internet browser for visually impaired users that provides multimedia control features and alternative user interfaces with external metadata.

• Multimedia audio control functions
When a page with multimedia content is opened, the audio often automatically starts playing. Using existing screen readers, there is no way to separately control the audio from the multimedia content and the sounds from the screen reader. The shortcut keys provided by aiBrowser provide this audio control. For example, while the audio is playing, Ctrl + J can be used to turn down the volume of the multimedia audio content, while Ctrl + K will increase the volume. Ctrl + S will stop the audio, Ctrl + P will resume playing, the Pause key will pause it, and Ctrl + M will mute that sound.


• User annotation function
Multimedia content pages are designed to be visually attractive, but there is generally little text information to be read. Also, there are few logical or structural hints such as headings, so it is almost impossible to navigate through multimedia content nonvisually. User annotation tries to address these problems by allowing users and volunteers to provide alternative text information and heading information without modifying the original Web content, including Flash content. This means users do not need to wait until the original content is modified and published.


• Providing accessible user interfaces by Fennec
Fennec is a novel technology in aiBrowser that can provide an efficient user interface for visually impaired users by adding accessibility information to the Web content. By using this technology, we can reorganize the content and add alternative texts to webpages. This allows visually impaired users who rely on text-to-speech user interfaces to understand the pages with less effort. Recently, more and more Web content tends to exploit visual effects such as background colors, various font sizes, images, and animations to represent essential structures and semantic information. However, presenting such visual information in speech is almost impossible. By externally supplementing the accessibility information (which is described in XML), Fennec provides an accessible user interface even for highly inaccessible content. Fennec can be applied to dynamic Web content such as Flash and DHTML as well as to static HTML content

The aiBrowser is available for download at IBM alphaWorks website. Please refer to the following pages for the system requirements, installation instructions, and Frequently Asked Questions for aiBrowser

• System requirements and installation instructions
• Frequently Asked Questions