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Non-visual skimming on touch-screen devices

While reading on touch-screens, sighted users can quickly pan through content, skim it, and pick out bits and pieces of information before deciding to read it more carefully. In contrast, blind users have to rely on the screen reader to narrate the content to them. To go through the text quickly, blind users employ gestures that direct the screen reader to skip to the next line or the next paragraph. However, the serial audio interface of the screen reader makes it difficult for blind users to get a sense of what is important before listening to, at least, a part of the content. This makes ad hoc skimming with gestures slow and ineffective. We address this problem in this paper; specifically we propose a non-visual skimming interface that enables blind users to control the amount of content with simple pinch-in and pinch-out gestures. This interface simulates the skimming experience enjoyed by sighted people, and enables blind users to listen to the gist of content, while controlling the speed of information intake. We report on a user study demonstrating that the proposed interface significantly outperforms ad hoc skimming techniques employed by blind users. Our results suggest that the proposed approach holds promise in empowering blind users to access digitized information much faster.