Audio access to calendars

The rise of 'Web 2.0' has brought a much more interactive aspect to the Web: users are no longer just reading pages, but creating them, modifying them, and interacting with them. The Web is increasingly becoming the preferred means of communication, and particularly booking events and appointments; online personal and corporate diaries allow friends and colleagues to arrange meetings and coordinate activities. Many of these types of online activities require users to perform the apparently simple task of entering a date. For sighted people who have access to pop-up calendars, selecting a date is quick and easy. Unfortunately, this facility is not currently available to people with visual impairments, for whom entering a correctly formatted date can be a difficult and time-consuming task, with mistakes having potentially serious consequences. Here we describe the process by which we designed and evaluated an audio interface for entering dates. An eye-tracking study gave insight into how tabular calendars help sighted people enter dates, This understanding was used to design an audio interface that used the cognitive advantages of the visual design, rather than mimicking the visual representation. Iterative testing was followed by an evaluation using participants with visual impairments that highlighted the problems with manual date entry, and which showed the audio system to be effective and popular. © 2010 ACM.