The HOMER UIMS for dual user interface development: Fusing visual and non-visual interactions

Existing systems which enable accessibility to graphical user interfaces (G UIs) by blind people follow an 'adaptation strategy'; each system adopts it s own hard-coded policy for reproducing visual dialogues in a non-visual fo rm, without knowledge about the application domain ol the particular dialog ue characteristics. It is argued that non-visual user interfaces should be more than automatically generated adaptations of visual dialogues. Tools ar e required to facilitate purposeful non-visual interface construction, allo wing iterative design and implementation. Such tools should cater for the c onstruction of 'integrated' user interfaces, which are concurrently accessi ble by sighted and blind users. Thus, the concept of dual user interfaces i s introduced, arguably as the most appropriate basis to address this import ant issue of concurrent accessibility, in order to prevent segregation of b lind people in computer-based working environments. A user interface manage ment system (UIMS) has been developed, called HOMER, which facilitates the development of dual user interfaces. HOMER supports the integration of visu al and non-visual toolkits of interaction elements; a non-visual toolkit, c alled COMONKIT, has been also implemented for building non-visual user inte rfaces, and has been incorporated in HOMER. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.