Voice interaction for accessible immersive video players

Hughes, CJ; Paton, J

Abstract

Immersive environments present new challenges for all users, especially those with accessibility
requirements. Once a user is fully immersed in an experience, they no longer have access to the devices that
they would have in the real world such as a mouse, keyboard or remote control interface. However these users
are often very familiar with new technology, such as voice interfaces. A user study as part of the EC funded
Immersive Accessibility (ImAc) project identified the requirement for voice control as part of the projects
fully accessible 360o video player in order to be fully accessible to people with sight loss. An assessment of
speech recognition and voice control options was made. It was decided to use an Amazon Echo with a node.js
gateway to control the player through a web-socket API. This proved popular with users despite problems
caused by the learning stage in the command structure required for Alexa, the timeout on the Echo and the
difficulty of working with Alexa whilst wearing headphones. The web gateway proved to be a robust control
mechanism which lends itself to being extended in various ways.

• Presentation Conference Type: Poster
• Conference Name: HUCAPP 2021 : 5th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction Theory and Applications
• End Date: Feb 10, 2021
• Acceptance Date: Nov 13, 2020
• Publication Date: Feb 9, 2021
• Deposit Date: Feb 18, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 18, 2021
• Book Title: Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 2 HUCAPP
• ISBN: 9789897584886-(online)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5220/0010255901820189
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.5220/0010255901820189
• Related Public URLs: http://www.hucapp.visigrapp.org; http://www.scitepress.org/DigitalLibrary/Default.aspx; https://www.scitepress.org/ProceedingsDetails.aspx?ID=uCFCIy+uDhc=&t=1
• Additional Information: Event Type : Conference