The vOICe Internet Sonification Browser

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The vOICe for Windows's built-in Internet Sonification Browser for the blind is meant for use in combination with a suitable screen reader, using Control F2 to mute, if necessary. For reading the text on web pages one can use a regular web browser like Microsoft Internet Explorer in combination with a screen reader. However, The vOICe Sonification Browser now also makes Internet graphics accessible, by letting you hear the images contained within HTML pages on the web.

The vOICe Sonification Browser is activated by pressing Control U or by traversing the File menu. A screenshot of the resulting browser dialog is given below, with example output for the United States Whitehouse government website URL https://www.whitehouse.gov

How to use: Pressing Control U gives you The vOICe Internet Access dialog in which you can enter either the direct URL of an image file, or the URL of a web page. The vOICe will in case of an image file URL first download the image to your current working directory, and from there automatically sonify the image. If you instead specify an HTML web page, this page will be parsed by The vOICe for any links or images, giving a numbered list in the next edit box within the dialog. After tabbing to that, you can use the up and down arrow keys, as well as the page up and page down keys, to move through the list. Pressing ENTER on any line will cause the corresponding item to be loaded. If it was a reference to an image file, it will be downloaded to your current working directory and sonified. If it was a link to yet another web page, this new web page will be loaded, thus resulting in a new list. The list of items is always organized such that one line gives the filename and the next line gives a further file description, if available. For instance, in case of an image, the image filename on one line is followed by the IMAGE description of the image on the next line. In case of a link, the link text is normally displayed on the second line.

The Back and Forward buttons (Alt+b and Alt+f) can be used to move back and forth among web page URLs much like in a regular browser. Note, however, that you have to press ENTER to activate the selected web page URL.

Apart from image file URLs and web page URLs, you can also give URLs of ZIP files, as well as WAV and MP3 sound files. In that case, The vOICe will just download these files to your current working directory, and do nothing else.

Distance education: The vOICe Sonification Browser can be applied to on-line visual training material, for learning to see with sound through distance learning.

For instance, if you load this very web page into the sonification browser, you will find an image named lineup.gif, which is a single bright line running upward to the right, so when activating the image reference you will hear a single tone going up in pitch in the repeating soundscapes. Similarly, you will find an image named lineflat.gif which shows a bright horizontal line with constant pitch, and an image named linea.gif showing a stylized capital "A" constructed from a rising and a falling line segment for the "legs" of the letter "A", and a horizontal line segment in between the legs to complete the capital "A". Educational institutes are invited to extend the training material with much more extensive on-line training courses for blind students. One may also think of accessing on-line graphs and function plots, for instance like the one shown on the accessible graphing calculator page.

Some simple geometrical shape images that you can listen to by using the sonification browser on this same page include several types of squares, circles, triangles and "hourglass" (diabolo) shapes, and a series of poles or pillars. After you have listened to the pillar image, can you hear out the pillars in the photograph of the Whitehouse?

Remarks:

• Although most web pages will be handled without problems, there can be exceptions, because not all web pages contain correctly written HTML code. Also, a number of more or less special situations are not yet supported.

• You may find that you need to press the "Get it" button (or ENTER key) twice before an image actually appears.

• Can I also hear the layout of a web page with images?

  Yes, but for this you must use a different approach, which does not make use of The vOICe Sonification Browser, but uses the screen sonification option instead. First, start your favourite browser, make sure image loading is on, maximize the browser window with Alt Space X to make it occupy the entire screen, and load whatever web page you wish to see. Next, Alt-tab focus to The vOICe for Windows and press Shift F9 for full screen sonification. Now you will hear the screen layout of your monitor, which displays the web page layout in your browser window plus the small window of The vOICe itself (which occludes a small part of your browser window by staying in front). Use inverse video F5 if desired, and use F4, Shift F4 and Control F4 for subsequent zoom levels while using the arrow keys to move around and bring any images near the center of the soundscape view before going to a next higher magnification level. You can try it on this very page to find how images are visually organized on this page! To see all of the web page, you will need to scroll down your browser window with Control arrow-down, because only part of the web page fits on the screen. (Make sure your browser window has focus here, because Control arrow-down in The vOICe instead scrolls only within a given zoomed screen view: this will only bring into view what is already displayed on the screen.) While scrolling down your browser window, you will subsequently hear the Internet Access dialog snapshot, then further down the three images in a row for the rising line, horizontal line and capital letter "A", respectively, and scrolling still further down you get to the remaining 9 images discussed above, organized in a 3 by 3 layout, with the Whitehouse photograph in the lower right corner of this 3 by 3 matrix, to the right of the pillar image. Finally, again further down, to the right side of these remarks there is a snapshot of The vOICe window while it performs full screen sonification in negative video with the browser showing part of this web page on the screen.

• Currently, the only supported proxy servers are so-called CERN proxies.

• Sometimes it can be useful to apply the Raster scan mode, toggled by Alt o r r (equivalent to navigating the Options menu). The Raster scan mode will scan an image line by line instead of the default mode where all image lines sound in parallel. Midway through the Raster scan you can, if desired, switch the vertical scan direction using the up and down arrow keys, including a state where the vertical position is kept fixed.