Augmenting Accessibility in Social Networks - A Virtual Presenter

Vila na Rede is an Inclusive Social Network (ISN) system developed as a product of e-Cidadania's Project, with the objective of being accessible to a broad variety of users, including those less familiar with technology or with low literacy skills. Different features were incorporated into Vila na Rede in order to provide its users with scaffolding learning support that helps them profit more from the system. One of these features is the Virtual Presenter, a speech synchronized facial animation system integrated to a text-tospeech synthesizer (TTS) that allows users to have textual information alternatively presented by a talking head. This paper investigates the integration of the Virtual Presenter into Vila na Rede system, and discusses results of activities conducted with the target audience to evaluate this new feature at the ISN.