DEVELOPMENT OF A COMPUTER APPLICATION FOR HANDICAPPED PEOPLE TO USE GMAIL

Handicapped people are a group of Internet and computer users. Some assistive technologies are designed for these people depending on their voice to apply voice commands to use technology. Gmail is one of the freely available and popular e-mail services and it has currently become most of people using Gmail as communication way with each other. The main aim of this paper is to introduce a computer application called HPG that can control and navigation the Gmail by voice commands. H_P_G helps handicapped people to send and receive their own emails, easily login and logout to their Gmail accounts, attach files if desired, and send and receive emails. The advantages of the developed system are that it is very low-cost, easy to use, and helps handicapped people to be in contact with their friends and family using their Gmail accounts. The developed application should also be useful to other researchers who wish to develop computer based applications for the handicapped people.