The Practical Side of Teaching the Elderly Visually Impaired Users toUse the E-Mail
Takuya Nishimoto, Masahiro Araki and Yasuhisa Niimi
Department of Electronics and Information Science, Faculty of Engineering and Design,
Kyoto Institute of Technology,

Matsugasaki, Kyoto, 6068585, JAPANnishi@vox.dj.kit.ac.jp

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 theUKK system, which guides the typing lessons with recorded sound and synthesized speech. We also
investigated the usability of the popular e-mail 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 are305,000 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 tolearn 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-timecommunication 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 e-mail. 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 thevisually impaired and novice PC users. A non-profit organization, SCCJ, has been carrying out “theInternet school for visually impaired persons” in Kyoto City since May 1999. 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 thetouch-type operations of the keyboard, because many adults were not taught the typing skill during theireducation 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.

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Sighted person
Learning applications
Learning typing

Visually impaired person
Learning
typingLearning
applications

Figure 1. If the novice PC users
are sighted persons, he or she canlearn
touch-typingandapplications
simultaneously.
However, if the person using thescreen-reader software is visuallyimpaired, the skill of touch-typing
will be required prior to lessons ofapplications.

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
2000. Therefore, we designed a system that guides the typing lessons with recorded sound andsynthesized speech. This software is named UKK (Uchikomi-kun).

2. DEVELOPMENT OF TYPING LESSON SOFTWAREAs shown in Figure 2, the training system we designed and implemented consists of the UKKplayer 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 operationsof the users. As a conclusion, good results were produced in some cases, and many people said that oursystem 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 toattract 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 thesynthesized 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 tothe stories of travel from the east coast to the west coast of the USA. Professional musicians andnarrators participated to make the contents.

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Commercial
UKK distribution
Install program
Commercial
TTS Engine

Other
TTS EnginesCommercial
UKK contents(text+wav)

UKK Player:
free software by KITFree
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 soundfiles. A TTS engine is required touse the system. UKK contents areeasily modified or replaced by theusers.

The unique feature of the system is that the contents are very easy to modify or be replaced bythe 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 thevisually 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 sequentialcommands, 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 areequivalent 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 theevaluations of this version in December 2000 with more than 10 persons who are aged or visuallyimpaired. 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 andWelfare. Supported by WAM, CD-ROM version of the system will be released in March 2001.

3. EVALUATION OF E-MAIL SOFTWARES
We also investigated how to teach the e-mail software itself. From the practical viewpoint, weevaluated the usability of two popular e-mail tools on Windows system and the Bilingual Emacspeak
Platform (BEP), which is currently developed as the open-source software [2]. In the evaluation, we onlyused 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 blindusers, compared to the one designed for CUI or AUI (Auditory User Interface)[3]. In our opinion, theproblem is not that what kind of UI model a software is based on. The conceptual models, the© 1993 Elsevier Science Publishers B. V.
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consistency between the operations, the labor in operations, the burden of the short-term memory, andthe 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 e-mail 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 theexpert usage.
The popular e-mail tools that the visually impaired can use, MM-Mail, WinBiff, and BEP (withMew) 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 conceptualmodel. 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 aneed 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 andoutput, 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 thebrowsing 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 becomesmuch easier because we can use speech recognition. VoiceXML also makes the maintenance of thecontents very easy.
As the preliminary test, we asked a novice user of Emacs/Mew to use e-mail with BEP. Thesubject 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 readthe e-mail 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 theserver-side implementations of HTML (Web) or E-mail tools, so the novice user can learn typing and use
the Internet with our VoiceXML browser alone. Other applications or environments for the professionalsuch as BEP can be used with the manuals provided in VoiceXML format. The tools described in thispaper will be distributed at http://www.sccj.com/ and http://www-vox.dj.kit.ac.jp/nishi/.

© 1993 Elsevier Science Publishers B. V.
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UKK Player

Typing lessons (ukk)

Typing lessons (vxml)
Manuals & lessons
For applications (vxml)

VoiceXML BrowserVoiceXML based
internet services

BEP (Emacspeak)Emacs based
Mailer & Web browser

Mail & Webservice

Figure 3 shows our current works(solid line) and future works(dotted line). The novice user canlearn keyboard and use theInternet with our VoiceXML
browser alone. Other applications
can be used with the manuals
provided in VoiceXML format.

Other self-voicing softwares (Mail,Web, etc.)

REFERENCES
1. http://www.w3.org/Voice/.
2. 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 AcademicPublishers (1997).
4. Mary Zajicek, The construction of speech output to support elderly visually impaired users starting touse the internet, Proceedings of ICSLP2000, Volume I, pp.150-153, (2000).
5. T. Nishimoto, H. Yuki, T. Kawahara and Y. Niimi, An Asynchronous Virtual Meeting System for BiDirectional Speech Dialog, Eurospeech’99, pp.2471-2474 (1999).

© 1993 Elsevier Science Publishers B. V.
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