Accessibility matters: The need of Bahasa Melayu (BM) screen reader for the visually impaired internet users

Abstract

Internet usage is rising at a frenzied rate as knowledge and information sharing becomes easy and time-saving. Regrettably, the visually impaired do not enjoy this liberty and they have difficulties in using the computer and the Internet to obtain any shared and published information. This difficulty is also faced by the visually impaired Bahasa Melayu (BM) language medium Internet users. Existing screen readers are unable to fully cater for users who need to browse webpages written in BM language. The inability of screen reader narration to enunciate BM words acceptably has limited the accessibility for the visually impaired to acquire any information in the BM language. Narration of the texts are done by non-BM speakers and the enunciation of those words confuses and often, do not help users. Thus, this paper addresses this shortcoming by investigating the difficulties faced by visually impaired Internet users to understand spoken texts when using screen readers with a non-BM language narrator or speaker. This study aims to reduce the time taken for the visually impaired to understand information written in the BM language and narrated by a screen reader. This paper highlights the processes involved in developing a prototype screen reader, which will read in the BM language and in a Malaysian accent. To achieve all the objectives, preliminary interviews and testing sessions were conducted to collect data to test the hypotheses made. The findings were then used as the main source of data to develop a prototype screen reader. From the built prototype, user-test was conducted with a sample group consisting of the visually impaired to test the functionalities and evaluate the effectiveness of the software. Results and recommendations are shared at the end of the paper as milestones for future enhancements.