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

Existing systems which enable accessibility to graphical user interfaces (GUIs) by blind people follow an `adaptation strategy'; each system adopts its own hard-coded policy for reproducing visual dialogues in a non-visual form, without knowledge about the application domain or the particular dialogue characteristics. It is argued that non-visual user interfaces should be more than automatically generated adaptations of visual dialogues. Tools are required to facilitate purposeful non-visual interface construction, allowing iterative design and implementation. Such tools should cater for the construction of `integrated' user interfaces, which are concurrently accessible by sighted and blind users. Thus, the concept of dual user interfaces is introduced, arguably as the most appropriate basis to address this important issue of concurrent accessibility, in order to prevent segregation of blind people in computer-based working environments. A user interface management system (UIMS) has been developed, called HOMER, which facilitates the development of dual user interfaces. HOMER supports the integration of visual and non-visual toolkits of interaction elements; a non-visual toolkit, called COMONKIT, has been also implemented for building non-visual user interfaces, and has been incorporated in HOMER.