2015 IEEE Conference on Open Systems (ICOS), August 24-26, 2015, Melaka, Malaysia
HABOS: Towards a Platform of Haptic-Audio
Based Online Shopping for the Visually Impaired
Eu Jin Wong, Kian Meng Yap
Faculty of Science and Technology
Sunway University, Selangor, Malaysia.
09018359@imail.sunway.edu.my,kmyap@sunway.edu.my
Abstract—As more and more retailers offer their products for
sale online, their web-based content is becoming increasingly
visual and complex for visually impaired persons to access,
navigate, and interpret when using current accessibility
technologies such as screen reader, voice browser and Braille
display. This hindered their independence to go online to
shop. In this paper, a study on whether visually impaired
people can shop online independently is presented. An online
store prototype which has shopping features such as shopping
cart, product catalogue, online forms and payment system was
developed for this purpose. The shopping features were
designed to enrich the web-based data with haptic and audio
properties. This paper examined and reported results on a
website design which could enable the visually impaired to
navigate, access, interpret and haptically interact with the web
content; and on a product catalogue system which could
enable the visually impaired to shop without assistance. Some
of our qualitative analysis suggests that a consistent three-
section webpage design with static content along with the aid
of directional cues and audio information are feasible to
design online shopping website for visually impaired. Also,
for effective haptic evaluation of online products, the
complete model and different parts of the model should be
rendered separately in order to provide the user with a better
perception about the product.
Keywords—Haptic; Audio; Haptic Shopping; Web Design
I. INTRODUCTION
E-commerce has become increasingly prominent as many
consumers buy their products online. However, a study of 50
popular websites conducted by T. Sullivan and R. Matson [1]
yielded the result that, around 82% of the websites considered
had some accessibility problems which made them partly
accessible or inaccessible. In the survey conducted by
WebAIM, almost 65% of the users had the opinion that
websites have become less accessible [2]. This has created a
serious problem for visually impaired. Due to the poor
accessibility of online shopping websites, visually impaired do
not shop online or if they do, they often request help from
sighted people.
According to the Department of Statistics of Malaysia [3],
the total volume of online transaction in Malaysia for 2009 is
approximately USD26 billion and over 8 million online buyers.
More and more local retailers are changing from brick and
978-1-4673-9434-5/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE
Jason Alexander, Abhijit Karnik
School of Computing and Communications
Lancaster University, Lancashire, U.K.
j.alexander@lancaster.ac.uk, a.karnik@lancaster.ac.uk
mortar to e-retailing, hence there is a need for the local visually
impaired people to be able to shop online. As the local access
fee for broadband Internet and the low-cost Falcon haptic
device become affordable, a possible solution based on haptic
and audio technologies to enable them to shop online could be
investigated.
Many researches had done in the past to enhance the web
applications by integrating haptic properties into web content
to enrich the applications with an added layer of modality
information, specifically through the sense of touch [4]. These
applications allow users to get a realistic experience of touch
by interacting with web 3D objects enriched with haptic
properties. However, there is very little research targeting in
solving how the visually impaired can shop online. One of the
main reasons is that in order to embed online products with
haptic and audio modalities, web browsers are needed to be
integrated with haptic device in order to render them. But,
currently popular web browsers such as Firefox, Internet
Explorer, Opera, Chrome and Safari do not have haptic plug-
ins, which is needed for haptic evaluation of online products.
Hence, in this study a haptic-audio based online shopping
system is developed in order to investigate whether the visually
impaired could shop online without assistance. The client part
of the system consist of a haptic-audio enabled browser to
enable the visually impaired to receive haptic feedback via a
haptic device and to issue voice command to interact with the
system. The server part of the system consists of an online
store which has conventional shopping features such as product
catalogue, shopping cart and payment system to allow users to
browse, interact, evaluate and purchase products.
The research questions investigated in this study were: (1)
whether using a consistent static three-section website design is
accessible to the visually impaired for online shopping; (2)
whether the product catalogue system which comprises a
haptic-audio enabled web browser and a catalogue system to
present products is feasible for the visually impaired to
haptically evaluate online products. The remainder of this
paper is organized as follows: Section II reviews the related
work; Section III discusses the research methodology; Sections
IV discusses the results and findings, and finally the conclusion
and future work is presented in Section V.
II. RELATED WORK
The design layout of website plays a fundamental role in
user accessibility for content retrieval. Despite guidelines from
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 2015 IEEE Conference on Open Systems (ICOS), August 24-26, 2015, Melaka, Malaysia
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [5], websites tend to
be designed with attractive visual layout without consideration
of the needs of users with disabilities. Web pages contain
ambiguous links, graphics without alternate description, and
tables with unstructured layout. Such layout design makes it
difficult for those with visual impairment to understand
webpage content or get the webpage overview, even with
assistive technology [6]. According to Bakos et al.[7], one
avenue for research is concern with the interaction between
assistive devices and website design which impedes the
visually impaired from gathering information needed to make
purchase decisions, which is one of the most fundamental
requirements of online shopping.
Interaction with web-based data is posing accessibility
problems for users with visual impairments in which they have
to rely on others for assistance in order to navigate and
interpret the information. Web pages are rendered by screen
reader as a continuous stream of audio that lacks logical
sections or segments. Hence, when Web pages have a complex
layout, the screen reader feedback becomes ambiguous [8].
Also, no rendering of graphics content, such as cues, embedded
in images, animations and videos that help the user in
navigation and interpretation [9]. For example, Flash animation
has no alternate text associated with them. So the visually
impaired will be unaware of the purpose of the animation. Lack
of user’s ability to point and click in order to interact with web
data that require mouse operation is also a problem [10]. Web
pages often contain invisible tables, columnar text and
graphical icons which are potential barriers to the assistive
technologies [11].
Pictures, diagrams and graphs which are often found on
web pages are difficult for synthesized speech or Braille to
interpret and also screen readers cannot describe images or
graphics that lack “alt tags” [12]. But, providing product
information in picture format is one way in which to
compensate for the lack of direct product experience conveyed
through our senses [13]. However, when pictures act as an
impairment, as they do for the visually impaired, research is
needed to investigate how to translate this sensory
compensation information into alternative modalities, such as
haptic or audio. When web sites fail to provide equivalent
information to persons with disabilities, or when only part of
any product's information is available to persons with
disabilities, these conditions disable the individuals and thus,
compromising their decision process quality [14].
According to Sukhatm et al. [15], the topic of transmitting
the sense of touch over the Internet through the use of web
applications has become increasingly more popular. Other
researches have also proposed systems to enhance browser
with haptic effects to enable the visually impaired to access the
Internet [16]. Also, researches to improve web accessibility
such as BrookesTalk, a text-to-speech system developed by
Zajicek et al. [17] in an attempt to present web page overview
to users by summarizing the content and a 3D audio based
browser was created by Donker et al. [18] to convey web
content.
Hughes et al. [19] presented a simplified authoring system
that allows integration of 3D haptic contents into the web
63
applications by using Virtual Reality Modeling Language
(VRML) [20] for the creation and manipulation of 3D content.
The system provides a haptic navigation interface for users to
navigate 3D virtual scenes in the web with the help of force
feedback. The haptic contents are embedded into the web
pages as VRML content which can be parsed via a browser
plugin. Saddik et al. [21] propose using open source web
haptic plugin through HTML5 with the aims to promote the
wide deployment of the haptic modality in web applications
and thus allowing access to a wide audience of interested
developers. The plugin uses Javascript API, which runs on
most web browser platforms, to provide haptic libraries for
developers to create haptic enabled web applications.
Bergamasco et al. [22] also propose a script based framework
called ‘HapticWeb’ for web haptic interaction by combining a
virtual reality engine called ‘eXtreme Virtual Reality’ [23] with
a haptic rendering engine and haptic interfaces. The framework
provides low level 3D graphics API and haptic rendering API
to allow developers to develop and integrate their applications
with a web browser via a plugin.
While there are various techniques to embed haptic
contents into web pages and many studies done to analyze the
webpage accessible problems as mention above, virtually no
research has been done to study and analyze the combination
of both in an online shopping environment. Therefore, this
paper sets out to fill this gap. Its goal is to propose a solution
and analyze whether the visually impaired could shop online
independently. The main focus lies not on the browser plugin,
but on integrating a web browser with a haptic device and
developing an online system so that the visually impaired could
shop and haptically evaluate online products.
III. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The system evaluation was done by visually impaired
volunteers of different age group and demography from the
Malaysian Association for the Blind. All participants had no
prior experience with any haptic devices. A total of 15
participants had successfully completed all the evaluation tasks
and their results were collected and analyzed. In the evaluation,
the system used a notebook with Intel i7 quad-core 3Ghz
processor, 2GB memory and 3D graphic controller with
500MB memory running Windows 7 operating system. The
participants interfaced with the system via a Falcon haptic
device [24] and a microphone headset.
Before the evaluation begins, every participant was briefed,
and given sufficient time to practice on the tutorial provided in
order to familiarize themselves with the usage of the Falcon
haptic device and the voice recognition system. The evaluation
sessions were recorded on video. These recordings provide
data on observations which were hard to understand and also to
analyze the actions of the participants such as haptic device
control and speech input. A questionnaire was used as one of
the research instruments to gather results from the participants.
Other responses from the participants that were not included in
the questionnaires were written in the comment section.
The evaluation methodology is focused on two aspects:
user satisfaction and effectiveness. According to Pu et al. [25],
 2015 IEEE Conference on Open Systems (ICOS), August 24-26, 2015, Melaka, Malaysia
satisfaction or dissatisfaction is a way in which users can
express their preferences upon the completion of the assigned
tasks, and according to Hornbæk [26], accomplishing the
assigned tasks successfully within a given timeframe is an
essential indicator of system effectiveness. For statistical
analysis of the evaluation result, a 7-point Likert scale [27] is
used in order to avoid having many tied ranks often associated
with the limited ordinal range of Likert scale (eg, a 5-point
scale). As the questionnaire is unique and stand-alone, hence
each question is treated as a single Likert item and a median is
used to determine the user satisfaction. The usability rating of
the system is measured based on the user satisfaction. The
scores of the 15 participants were used to calculate the median
to indicate the usability rating according to the 7-point scale: 1
= ‘Strongly Dissatisfied’, 2 = ‘Dissatisfied’, 3 = ‘Weakly
Dissatisfied’, 4 = ‘Neutral’, 5 = ‘Weakly Satisfied’, 6 =
‘Satisfied’ and 7 = ‘Strongly Satisfied’.
The effectiveness of the system is measured based on the
total number of participants who accomplished all the assigned
tasks successfully within a given timeframe of 10 minutes.
Each participant who completes within the timeframe is given
a score of 0.467. The total score of the successful participants
were added together to calculate the effectiveness rating. For
example, if all 15 participants were successful, the rating
would be a 7 which indicate ‘Highly Effective’ according to
the 7-point scale.
A. HABOS Website
Figure 1. HABOS Home Page
The haptic-audio based online shopping (HABOS) system
is a client-server prototype. The client side consists of a haptic-
audio enabled Opera-based web browser and the server side
consists of an online store which was developed using
XHTML markup language, VoiceXML programmable voice,
H3D haptic API, X3D scene graph, C++ and Python
programming language running on the Windows, Apache,
MySQL and PHP (WAMP) platform. In this research paper,
the study focuses on two components of the system which are
the HABOS’s website design and product catalogue system.
The HABOS’s website is a home furnishing store with
features such as product catalogue, shopping cart, payment
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system, newsletter and contact-us. The overall design has a
consistent three-sections layout design for easy navigation and
access to web content. The top banner section provides an
option to exit the current web page and display content of
another page. This section usually contains the shopping cart
option which allows the user to check the cart content. The
middle section is used to present the data when an option is
selected. The footer section contains options that are related to
the data presented in the middle section. Every web page has
an introductory audio message to describe the page layout and
is surrounded by four frames. The top, bottom, left and right
frame are used to warn user that the pointer had reached the
edge of the page.
The design also eliminates the usage of keyboard and
mouse device, it allows the user to either use voice command
or the Falcon device to navigate and interact. For example, to
visit the online store, the user gives a voice command ‘Browser
Ekea’ and the web browser will then retrieve the home page as
shown in Figure 1. User can navigate and interact with the
page either by giving voice commands such as ‘Browser Next
Page’ or via buttons on the Falcon device. To assists user in
navigation, the system keeps track on the position of the haptic
device pointer, whenever the pointer hovers over or leaves an
active portion of the web page, directed dialogue will direct the
user to the next available options.
Shopping cart is used to hold the items that the customers
intend to buy before checking out. The item details such as
description, price, quantity and total amount can be stored in
the browser’s cookies or in the server’s session variables.
When the user views the shopping cart content, the item’s
details will be read out for the user to verify. Filling in form is
a difficult task for the visually impaired when using AT
devices such as screen reader because it will read the form in a
linearised manner which is difficult for the user to memorize
all the fields and find the correct field to enter the correct data.
Hence, the payment system is designed to help the user to
automatically fill forms. The website also contain newsletter
page used for dissemination of latest news, events and special
offers. The contact-us page contains the company’s contact and
email addresses.
B. Experimental Procedure
The aim of this experimental procedure is to find out
whether the HABOS’s website design is effective for the
visually impaired to navigate and interpret its content. The
evaluation consisted of a series of web pages navigation and
interaction scenarios which require the participants to perform.
They were not given any assistance and they were free to make
any decision during the evaluation to either use the Falcon
device or voice command to navigate or interact. The series of
scenarios is to test the participants’ abilities to navigate,
browse, interpret and interact with the website. A task was
considered successfully completed when the selected page’s
content and layout is understood by the participants, and
following instructions to proceed to the next task. The
participants began with the home page by issuing a voice
command ‘Browser Ekea’ and then perform the following
series of navigations:
 2015 IEEE Conference on Open Systems (ICOS), August 24-26, 2015, Melaka, Malaysia
1. Select Product Catalogue
2. Select & Browse every model in Catalogue (chair, sofa,
table & miscellaneous)
3. Select Shopping Cart
4. Select Payment
5. Return to Home Page
6. Browse Newsletter
7. Select Contact Us
For each of these scenarios the participants were required to
follow the directional cues for navigation, interpret the audio
information and issue voice command according to the directed
dialogue for system interactions such as display next page or
previous page, select shopping cart option and display the
payment form. After completing all the tasks, each
participant’s total time taken was recorded and interviewed for
their ratings to the below questions:
1. How usable is the Navigation System?
2. How usable is the Voice Interactive System?
The effectiveness of the HABOS website design was measured
based on the total number of users who accomplished all the
assigned tasks successfully within a given timeframe. The
usability of the navigation and voice interactive systems were
measured based on participant’s satisfaction in term of system
responsiveness, ease of usage and dialogue presentation.
C. Product Catalogue
Figure 2. Product Catalogue
The HABOS’s product catalogue system comprises two
components. The client side component includes a haptic-audio
enabled web browser and the server side component includes
the product catalogue (see Figure 2). The system is designed to
use the Falcon device and voice command to interact with the
product’s model. Every product’s description was presented to
the user in a form of audio information render by the Text-to-
Speech (TTS) engine. An introductory audio description about
its specification and price is presented when a model is in
display. When the user selects a product’s model, it will be
presented as a virtual 3D model for the user to evaluate. To
evaluate a model, the user uses the haptic device stylus to trace
the product’s dimension and shape, and feel the product texture
and firmness or weight. To provide a wider workspace for
evaluating product, the model is presented in full screen mode.
This allows users to haptically feel a bigger model which will
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help them to evaluate the product better. If the participant
decides to purchase the product after evaluation, he or she can
select the ‘Add To Cart’ option to add the product into the
shopping cart.
Figure 3. Different parts of a chair model
Different parts of the product’s model are rendered
separately in order to provide the user with a better perception
about the model (see Figure 3). Each part of the model is
accompanied by an audio description to describe in detail about
the structure and material. This is to give the participants an
overall understanding of how the different parts of the model
are connected together. A total of four products categories
namely chair, sofa, table and miscellaneous are selected to
provide a wide spectrum of texture, stiffness, size and shape in
order to gather a better analysis on the user’s evaluation on the
haptic properties.
The store’s products were digitized and modeled into X3D
format using Autodesk 3DS software. H3D [28] is used to add
haptic and audio properties to the virtual scene codes to present
the product. An important feature of H3D is that the scene
definition is defined in X3D and it support audio. Since, both
uses X3D codes, they can be combined into a single .x3d file to
deliver the 3D object with haptic interaction such as collision
detection, frictional effects, force effects and thread handling.
The advantage is that the graphic, haptic and audio properties
can be applied to the objects in the root node and the properties
will be recursively applied to its child objects.
D. Experimental Procedure
The aim of this experimental procedure is to find out
whether the HABOS’s product catalogue is a feasible for
presenting products for browsing, selection and evaluation. The
evaluation consisted of a series of product selection and
interaction scenarios which require each participant to perform
with the Falcon haptic device and with voice command. The
series of scenarios is to test the participants’ abilities to select
products, haptically evaluate them, add them to the shopping
cart and finally check-out for payment. A task was considered
successfully completed when a model was selected and add to
shopping cart. The participants began with the product
catalogue page and then perform the following series of
interactions:
1. Select Product Catalogue
2. For each of the four product categories
3. Select a desire model
4. Haptically evaluate the model
5. Add to Shopping Cart
6. Verify Cart Content
7. Select and Process Payment
 2015 IEEE Conference on Open Systems (ICOS), August 24-26, 2015, Melaka, Malaysia
For each of these scenarios the participants were required to
choose a model for each of the four product categories and
evaluate the model’s dimension, shape, material texture and
firmness using the haptic device. After evaluating the model, if
the participant feels like buying the product, he or she could
add the model into the shopping cart. The participant could
also verify the cart content anytime. After adding four products
into the cart, the participant proceeds to pay for the products.
While performing the task, they are required to interpret the
product’s audio information and follow the audio instructions
to execute the task. After completing all the tasks, the
participant was asked to rate the following question:
1. How usable is the Product Catalogue system?
2. How usable is the Haptic Evaluation system?
The usability of the product catalogue and haptic evaluation
systems were measured based on participant’s satisfaction in
term of overall system interaction, ease of usage,
responsiveness during haptic evaluation, information
presentation, shopping cart verification and payment process.
IV. RESULTS AND FINDINGS
Figure 4. Evaluation Results
A. HABOS Website Results and Findings
All 15 participants successfully completed all the tasks.
From the HABOS website design result (see Figure 4), the
effectiveness rating is 5.6 which means that 12 out of 15
participants completed all the tasks within the timeframe, while
3 of them took 15 minutes or more to complete. According to
their feedback, it was due to their lack of experience in IT and
computer usage. Based on the result, it showed that the
consistent three-section webpage design with static content
together with audio cues and directed dialogue was feasible, as
most of the participants were able to navigate, interact and
interpret with the web content to complete all the tasks within
the timeframe without assistance.
The navigation system usability rating is 6.0 (see Figure 4)
which indicates that most of the participants found the directed
dialogue and directional cues were usable for navigating the
website. Based on our observation, it was learned that the
participants could interpret the directed dialogue in order to
navigate to the next options. They knew their whereabouts
while browsing through the pages because the directional cues
update their position constantly.
66
The usability rating for the voice interaction system is 5.0
(see Figure 4), which indicates that most of the participants
found it feasible to use voice command for system interaction.
However, based on our observation, it was learned that the
participants need to repeat the same command a few times
before the system recognized the phrase. It could be due to the
fact that different participants had different voice pitch,
intonation and pronunciation. Hence, the voice recognition
engine took a bit of time to adjust to the different speakers.
Overall, our findings suggest that a consistent three-section
webpage design with static content along with the aid of
directional cues and directed dialogue were feasible to design
website for visually impaired in order for them to understand
the page layout easier. By having a consistent middle section of
the page to present data of selected option, by having the footer
section offering options related to the data presented and by
having the top section offering different system options. In this
way, the simple layout design could helped them to understand
the page overview which in turn enabled them to navigate the
website easier.
Keeping track on the position of the haptic device pointer
when hovering over or leave an active portion of the web page,
in order to give directed dialogue to direct the users to nearby
options available or instructing them to go to another location
is useful for navigation, as the user will not get lost while
browsing the page because the directional cues update the user
about their position constantly.
Having each page surrounded by four active frames, at the
top, bottom, left and right edge of the Window’s screen is
important to the design as it helped the user to avoid getting
lost at the edges of the screen, by giving directional cues to tell
the user to move the stylus to another location.
Another finding is that using voice command can be
difficult initially because the voice recognition engine has to
learn and recognize the speaker’s voice pitch, intonation and
pronunciation. To overcome this users need a longer period of
training and should be aware that speaking to voice recognition
engine is different from speaking to human, and they must
speak fluently.
B. Product Catalogue Results and Findings
From the product catalogue result (see Figure 4), the
usability rating is 6.0 which indicates that most of the
participants found the catalogue system usable for online
shopping. Based on our observation, it was learned that they
could browse and interpret the products information; choose
the desire products’ models based on their description;
haptically evaluate the models; add and verify them in the
shopping cart; and pay for them.
The usability rating for product’s haptic evaluation is 5.0
(see Figure 4), which means that most of the participants could
effectively use the Falcon device to feel and evaluate the
different products’ dimension, shape, texture and stiffness.
Based on our observation, it was learned that they found the
haptic device easy to use, the kinesthetic sensing (force
experienced) was strong, tactile sensing (touch experienced)
was sensitive, and the response of the device was fast.
 2015 IEEE Conference on Open Systems (ICOS), August 24-26, 2015, Melaka, Malaysia
Overall, our findings suggest that the clarity of the audio
product information and using different speaker voices such as
Microsoft Windows ‘Anna’, ‘Mary’ and ‘Sam’ to deliver
various audio information, warnings and directed dialogue are
important for good product presentation. By using different
speaker it can help the user to differentiate the various audio
messages better.
For effective haptic evaluation of product, the complete
model and different parts of the model should be rendered
separately in order to provide the user with a better perception
about the product. When rendering the complete model, audio
messages describing the part in detail should be used when the
stylus is touching the part. This is to give the user an overall
picture of how the different parts of the model are connected
together. However, when rendering individual parts of the
model, short contact sound cues should be used to indicate
whether the stylus is touching or not touching the part’s
surface. This is to prevent user’s cognitive overload due to
excessive audio information.
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
This paper examine on the website design and product
catalogue of the HABOS system for the visually impaired to
shop online without assistance. A simple consistent three-
section design with static content could allow them to
understand the overall web page overview and layout easier. A
catalogue system together with a haptic-audio enable browser
could enable them to browse, select and haptically evaluate
online products. Through a series of users’ evaluations on
navigation using directed dialogue and directional cue; on
system interaction using voice command; on product
interpretation using audio description; and on product
evaluation using haptic force feedback. The results showed that
most of the participants found the catalogue system usable and
the website design is effective for online shopping. Last but not
least, we hope that this study could provide a foundation for
future investigations into the design of haptic-audio based
online shopping applications for the visually impaired, so that
they could actively participate in the e-commerce evolution.
For future extension, we plan to work on the following:
• voice based query module to help users in acquiring
information about the products and to search for products
by filtering the products based on voice query
• using HTML5 Server Sent Events to serve dynamic content
in a consistent section of the web page.
ACKNOWLEDEGMENT
This work was supported by the Small Grant Scheme -
Sunway-Lancaster (Grant No: SGSSL-FST-CSNS-0114-04) at
Sunway University, Malaysia.
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