Betsie brings Web to the blind

Betsie: Said to work on 95% of BBC pages

BBC Education has produced a new piece of software to help blind and visually impaired people navigate the Internet.

The program is being released free as 'open source' software in the hope that others will take it up and develop it further - asking only that if they do so, they notify BBC Education.

The program is called Betsie - an acronym for BBC Education Text to Speech Internet Enhancer. It is being shown off at the British Educational Training and Technology Show (BETT) at London's Olympia.

It requires the addition of a speech synthesizer, which blind users of the Internet will typically have.

Betsie takes heavily-formatted Internet pages and strips out the text into a more accessible form. The developers claim it works far better than existing programs of its type.

BBC Education's software engineer Wayne Myers says: "Standard screen-reading software finds it difficult to detect columns of text, which means that the vast majority of web sites, including some of our own, are effectively inaccessible to online users with sight difficulties.

'Gibberish'

"Most sites come out like gibberish, all disjointed, with half a line here, half a line there like some kind of random beat poetry, which isn't always what you want. The funny thing is that the sites that do this include some of the biggest and most popular places on the whole Web.

"Betsie effectively removes all the columns and rearranges the contents so the most meaningful information appears at the top of the page. This gets round the difficulties that most text-to-speech readers experience when they come across those irritating navigation bars.

"Betsie does not alter the original site in any way, but rearranges content on a page-by-page basis. All the hyperlinks on a Betsie-enhanced page are altered such that they point to the Betsie-enhanced version of each page rather than the original."

To see the Betsie version of this education section at BBC News Online, click here.

There are limitations. The technical notes on the Betsie site say it does not work with forms which assume JavaScript to be present and it cannot eliminate problems with pages that contain syntactically incorrect JavaScript. It fails on about 5% of the BBC's pages, for various reasons.

Still, the Information SuperHighways Project Manager for the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), Mark Prouse, welcomes the development.

"RNIB applauds the work that has gone into devising Betsie. The BBC Education site is of tremendous potential value to blind and partially sighted people, and Betsie will certainly enable them to access it a good deal more speedily, and with less frustration."