Chapter 1
Introduction
Introduction
This chapter will introduce the project, outline the aims, and give an overview of what the project is about. The chapter is divided into three sections:
1.2 Overview
1.3 Project Development
1.1. Aim of the Project
The purpose of this project is to deliver to a visually impaired user a newspaper containing news about subjects they are interested in, using the Internet to obtain this news. This will allow the newspaper to be downloaded at a pre-determined time, i.e. when there is little Internet traffic and the phone calls are cheap, and viewed offline.
1.2. Overview
The project was designed to allow a much greater freedom of information to visually impaired users by making the process of getting the latest news from the Internet easier. The project will provide the user with an easy and cheap way to get news about subjects of interest.
A full background to the project, and a more complete rationale behind its conception are included in Chapter 2.
The project will be implemented as an application that runs on a users machine. It will run on the Microsoft Windows operating system, and will adhere to as many windows standards as possible to allow it to be used with a screen reader.
The application will allow the user to choose which pages to include in the newspaper by choosing them from a set of hierarchical menus. The menus will be arranged into categories, so for example the top-level menu could consist of “Sport”, “News”, “Holidays”, “Weather”, etc. Selecting one of these menus will take the user to sub-categories on that subject, so clicking on “Sport” might give new options: “Football”, “Rugby”, “Motorsport”, etc.
The pages that can be chosen from are stored in a database on a central server. This is set up and maintained at the central location. A copy of the database is included with the application, and the user can choose to download the latest version of the page database at any time. Once the newest version of the database has been downloaded any new pages that have been added will be available from the menus.
Once the user has chosen what pages they want included, they can either choose to download the newspaper immediately or send the system to sleep until a predetermined time when it will automatically perform the download.
Once the download has been initiated, the system will try and get each of the pages specified by the user and convert them into plain text. It will then re-compile these plain text documents into a single hierarchical document that can be read using a talking web browser or a normal web browser with a screen reader.
1.3. Project Development
In order to complete the project, a number of activities had to be performed:
- Extensive research into existing talking newspaper systems was undertaken with a view to understanding how such systems meet the needs of visually impaired users, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. This information was then used to aid in designing a system that helps build on the strengths of the existing systems, and tries to avoid some of their weaknesses.
- Some research was done into what people are likely to want included in the talking newspaper, and how they envisage it should work. This information was vital in designing a system that a visually impaired user would actually find useful, and that met their needs.
- A detailed set of requirements was drawn up based upon the research findings, and the design was created to fulfil these requirements. The design changed slightly over the course of the project due to unforeseen problems, and new ideas about how things should work. The design also changed during testing, as certain areas were deemed to be in need of improvement.
- A formal design using an established design method was produced to show how the system works in detail. This includes detailed sections covering complex areas such as GUI design and Parser design.
- A period of coding and testing was required, followed by final testing and field tests before the system could be regarded as usable.
- A set of user instructions explaining the systems use was produced. These can be found in Appendix C.
- Finally all the documentation was collated into this report.
The report consists of the following chapters:
- Background and Rationale
This chapter gives an
overview of the problems the project is trying to address. It explores existing
systems, discussing their strengths and weaknesses. It finishes by explaining
the justification for doing the project and how it will contribute to solving
the problems discussed.
- Requirements and Methods of Investigation
This chapter describes
the methods used in researching the project. It shows how the requirements in
the system were arrived at and why each is important. It finishes by giving the
complete set of requirements for the project.
- System Design
This chapter contains the
design of the systems operation with descriptions of the design methods used.
Where appropriate certain aspects of the systems operation are explained in
greater detail.
- Design Decisions and Project Development
This chapter describes the
major decisions that had to be made during the design and implementation of the
system. It lists the alternative approaches that could have been used for each,
which was chosen and why.
- Implementation
This
chapter covers certain aspects of how the design was implemented. It covers the
data structures used, and the difficulties encountered. It describes changes
that had to be made to the original specification during
implementation.
- Testing
This
chapter describes the testing strategy used, and the results of
testing.
- Conclusions and Further Work
This chapter contains the
conclusions that can be drawn from the project. It also contains suggestions
about how the project could be improved, and what further work could be done on
it.
There is also a glossary near the end of the report that explains some of the technical terms used in the report.
In the appendices at the back of the report there is extra information including:
There is also a glossary near the end of the report that explains some of the technical terms used in the report.
In the appendices at the back of the report there is extra information including:
- Appendix A contains some screen shots of the application’s user interface.
- Appendix B contains some samples of outputs produced by the system, with what the web pages looked like before and after they were processed.
- Appendix C contains the user instructions distributed with the system.
- Appendix D contains a copy of the release notes included with the latest release of the application.
- Appendix E contains some more in-depth details about the format of the page database.
- Appendix F contains the pseudo-code for the algorithm used to split URLs when processing links within pages.
- Appendix G contains the tests carried out on the system, and the results of each test.