Lourdes Morales: Formatting Checker Tool for Blind Word-Processor Users: Prototype Formatting Checker Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007

Blind people are aware that documents they produce with word processors contain formatting and layout errors, i.e. errors that deal with incorrect and inconsistent presentation and positioning of text, and often require sighted help to look over their documents. Some reasons for this are that using screen readers to check the formatting and layout attributes of a document requires a lot of work and the information available to their screen readers from Microsoft Office Word (the word processor that most blind people use) is sometimes unreliable. In this research, we aim to design and build a Microsoft (MS) Office Word Add-in to assist blind people with the independent creation and correction of word processed documents by providing screen-reader friendly feedback on the document’s formatting and layout attributes.

 

Lourdes Morales, a senior Computer Science student from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, worked with Research Advisor Prof. Sri Kurniawan, Computer Engineering graduate student Sonia M. Arteaga, and Shehba Shahab, a senior Information Systems Management student, from the University of California, Santa Cruz; on designing and testing a prototype Add-in for MS Office Word 2007 that helps blind people check their document’s formatting by displaying textual feedback easily read by a screen reader, and that is easy to use and access through simple shortcut keys. For future work, we plan to run more user studies to evaluate the current prototype, improve the Add-in with the feedback from the studies, design another Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 that helps blind people check the layout of the text in their documents and make both Add-ins compatible for Microsoft Office Word 2010.