Every day, more and more information is being made available online to the general public in the form of electronic documents. Since the advent of the WWW, hypertext (in particular, HTML) has become the medium of choice for the presentation of these documents. This is because HTML can be used to present not only the text of a document, but also much of its structure. The ability to use this structure in a generic (multi-modal) way would mean that electronic documents could be accessible to everyone, even non-standard users such as blind users or users connecting to the WWW via the telephone.

In this talk, I will present my research into the development of audio interfaces to HTML that can allow blind users (and others) to access the WWW non-visually. In particular, I will discuss the AHA (or Audio HTML Access) framework that I developed for choosing the types of audio markings to use in an HTML interface. This framework, which was based on user testing, can be used in conjunction with other information about the users and their tasks to allow interface designers to select specific sounds for the presentation of HTML in audio..