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:
1.1 Aim of the Project
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
- 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.