Students of Tomsk State University Are Developing An Application Which Will Help Persons with Visual Disorders Read Websites

Online, March 25, 2014 (Newswire.com) - It will help persons with visual disorders visit web pages and get information which ordinary screen readers are not able to read.

"RIW is a cloud application for persons with visual disorders (color-blindness, eye lens degeneration, partial loss of vision, blindness). To find the required information on the Internet, they mostly use screen readers and have to face the fact that such programs do not read many website elements", Evgeny Sidnev told. "Such elements include Flash contents, pop-up windows, dropdown menus, etc. Our application will solve such problems being able to present the necessary information to users."

The students' application quasi draws the information out from hardly accessible elements, and as a result, screen readers can read it aloud to users. That being said, the web page's structure remains intact. You don't have to install the application: you can just run it via any popular web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Chrome and others. The students are also planning to develop client applications for desktops, tablets and smartphones.

At the present moment, Sapunity founded by the students is a resident of "Druzhba", an inter-university business incubator. The students hope to get the necessary investments for their project's development in a short time.

The students' work was highly appreciated. They got a certificate for passing the first stage of selection for an international group called "100 Innovators" supported by the Youth Program of "Open Innovations" Forum and were offered financial support from EMC, one of the major companies at the market of products, services and solutions for information storage and management.

Free online beta-testing of the application will start soon.
Contact telephone: 8 952 899 05 57 (Evgeny Sidnev).