Text summarization contributions to universal access

Abstract

Individuals who access electronic text with Braille and synthetic speech, or who have reading disabilities are often limited in their ability to quickly skim large documents. This paper introduces the use of computer generated text summaries as an alternative method of skimming. Readers with disabilities will more rapidly determine central themes of the material, assess the relevance of a document, identify important segments to be read in detail, or decide to move on to another text. An implementation is presented in which two commercial text summarizers are added to a prototype communication system developed for deaf-blind users, however the concept is more broadly applicable to persons who are blind, deaf, and dyslexic.