E-Mail and Text Reader for Students with Disabilities

Requirements Document

This document is an attempt to describe the necessity and requirements for the E-Mail and Text Reader for Students with Disabilities. The software program, assigned as a two semester Senior Project for a group of four computer science students, has been requested by Dr. Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., University of Illinois Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services.

The overall aim of the project is to place a fully functional e-mail/text reader program in student computer labs across the UIUC campus. The software should be designed with the intent of providing a more easily accessible user environment for disabled students wishing to perform basic e-mail and text reading functionality.

The program should mostly accommodate to the concerns of students with visual impairments. This constraint requires the program to provide features often neglected in more common programs that assume unimpaired users. For instance, most programs have default font sizes that may be much too small to be effectively distinguished by users with a visual impairment. Even if the settings in these programs may be changed the fact remains that the process itself of changing settings may require unimpaired user assistance. Unfortunately, this is a best case scenario considering that many more programs don’t even have settings that would suit disabled users adequately. The E-Mail and Text Reader program will be designed with much more than merely default setting considerations for the visually impaired. In fact, it should cater so specifically to impaired users that providing functionality for unimpaired users that may be assisting the intended user audience is actually a minor obstacle in itself that also needs to be addressed.

Before describing specific program features there is some need to explain the program’s necessity considering that other programs with similar aims may already exist. One issue is that the UIUC computer network has specific platform requirements that may not interface well with proprietary software. A program specifically designed for the UIUC campus also has the advantage of being able to utilize UIUC resources, such as user account space for default settings, which may not be supported in pre-existing programs. Also of consideration, it is much cheaper to have unpaid undergraduate students undertake a project which includes researching cost-effective, hopefully free, solutions to the process of creating a very specific piece of software.

Required Features

The E-Mail and Text Reader program should contain the following features as established by Dr. Gunderson:

• The e-mail portion should provide students the ability to read, reply and compose e-mail with all the basic features available in existing programs including the ability to send and receive MIME attachment files.
• The e-mail portion must use IMAP.
• Program must be compatible with the Microsoft Windows NT environment.
• Every operation that may be performed needs to be supported by well acknowledged keystroke short cuts.
• Program font colors, font sizes, background colors, button sizes, button text fonts, button text colors and all other important settings need to be configurable to be able to address the many varying individual concerns of students with specific impairments and preferences.
• Consideration of font sizes that may be very large with respect to the GUI window. One possible solution to this problem is to focus on text much in the same way that a magnifying glass is used to follow very small text.
• Text-to-speech functionality for both e-mail reading and arbitrary text reading as well as program navigation such as having button labels read upon being highlighted.
• Simple long term highlighting of text especially for the text reader portion.
• The ability to enable and disable text-to-speech freely.
• The text reader portion needs to provide specific text-to-speech features including the ability to read headers only and subsequently to start reading text immediately after a specific header.
• Rolling text highlights synchronized with words spoken during text-to-speech.
• Saved setting preferences including system metrics for individual students hopefully utilizing the student’s university account, however utilizing saved settings from floppy disks is a reasonable alternative.

Case Scenarios

To further illustrate the necessity of each feature what follows will be a series of user scenarios, which should provide specific user instances, which stress certain portions of the program more heavily.

User Case 1:

Bob has a visual impairment, which requires him to focus closely on objects, however he is able to distinguish large font characters on a computer screen more easily than most users of the program. When Bob goes to the computer lab to check his e-mail he prefers to read the screen himself if the text is large enough, so he disables the text-to-speech feature of the e-mail reader. Bob likes to change colors so that the background contrasts heavily with the text. He also likes that the button labels are in large font so that he can read them. He reads and writes his e-mail much like unimpaired users, with the exception of the font sizes and colors that he uses.

User Case 2:

Jim has never used the e-mail reader before so he is grateful that when he pulls up the program, it recognizes that he has no user profile setup and he is read a few possible selection choices including the instruction to access the menu containing all the short-cut key strokes he may need in the future. Jim has a more severe visual impairment than Bob and keeps the text-to-speech element to navigate the window, especially while he is still unfamiliar with program. The program instructs him to press specific buttons for more options or to enable certain features. He most appreciates that as he tabs through features the computer reads each option to him so that he can quickly understand what each selection may provide. Later on when Jim wants to write e-mail he likes that he can have the text-reader read his own e-mail to detect any errors he may have typed that escaped his notice on the screen. Jim needs to have a very large and focused viewing field, so the e-mail reader can not possibly display many words on the screen at a time in order for him to follow along as the text-reader reads to him. He likes that the words being read to him become highlighted as they are read and that the e-mail reader automatically tracks the text so that he doesn’t have to keep pressing the down arrow in order for the highlighted word being spoken to appear somewhere on the program window.

User Case 3:

Wendy needs to read a paper given to her by her music professor. The paper is several pages long and contains many sections. She is most interested in only the portions of the paper that pertain to the cello and the piano, both of the instruments that she plays. After having the introduction read to her she decides that she wants to have the section headers read afterwards to guide her towards the sections about the instruments she plays. Unfortunately the section headers don’t help too much for this specific paper so instead she performs a search for the word ‘cello’ and decides to start the text reader at the first word of paragraph in which ‘cello’ first appears. After reading the first half of this paragraph she realizes that she probably needs to go back a few paragraphs in order to understand what is currently being read so she stops the text reader and has it start reading from the first word of the paragraph two before where ‘cello’ first appears. She likes that when she is jumping from paragraph to paragraph a large window appears that prompts her in written and spoken words to indicate which direction forward or back she wants to jump, and then prompts her to write the number of paragraphs to jump.

User Case 4:

Mary’s high school friend Cindy has had a visual impairment all of her life. Since they ended up at the same school Mary has often aided Cindy in some of the tasks that don’t come easily to her. When Cindy learned about the e-mail reader she wanted to use in the computer lab she asked Mary to help her use it. Mary was impressed by the text-to-speech capabilities but was able to navigate on her own by finding the keystroke short cut menu that was labeled well. She found that all of the necessary operations that Cindy might need were labeled on the GUI itself or were placed logically within the click of a button. Mary told Cindy to remember the ‘Help’ short-cut keystroke, which explained many of the program features in speech. Most importantly Mary was able to configure the program settings suited to Cindy’s needs easily because a configuration window was easily reachable from the opening screen. With Mary’s help Cindy was soon able to go to the lab on her own and check her e-mail.

Implementation Considerations

The E-Mail and Text Reader program will require the use of several different tools. The Microsoft Visual Studio environment appears to be the best programming environment in which to accomplish the goals of presenting an effective GUI and combining both the additional IMAP and speech components. The text-to-speech toolkit that appears to be the most effective is the Microsoft Speech API (SAPI), which has the benefit of already being owned by the client. Finding a cost and time effective IMAP implementation will be of prime concern during future stages of the project. The Visual Studio environment encompasses something called COM, Microsoft’s Component Object Model, which promises to be extremely useful in combining all three separate portions of the program, IMAP, SAPI, and the GUI. Of the Visual Studio languages Visual Basic (VB) seems to be the best choice for a GUI implementation as well as a caller of COM objects. In order to complete an effective program all of the programming tools COM, IMAP, SAPI, and VB will need to be understood.