Sadie: Semantic annotation for accessibility

ACM Conference on Hypertext, 2005

The WWW is today the biggest source of information and an essential tool for many activities of daily life. Unfortunately, information seeking in this complex hypermedia environment is generally not an easy task. The potentially complex task of information seeking in the WWW is further complicated when the end-user is blind or visually impaired (VI). Usually, web pages are created without taken accessibility into account and without using HTML markup correctly to express the functional structure of documents. Both facts pose a lot of problems to VI during information seeking in the web. In this paper we discuss problems related to this issue and how the information seeking process in the WWW could become more effective and efficient for the VI. We also present an ongoing research effort, inspired from the idea of Semantic Web, aiming to enhance browsing efficiency as a result of rationalizing the way VI browse the WWW.

International Journal of Distance Education Technologies, 2011

Searching for relevant information on the web is an important aspect of distance learning. This activity is a challenge for visually impaired distance learners. While sighted people have the ability to filter information in a fast and non sequential way, blind persons rely on tools that process the information in a sequential way. Learning is slowed by screen readers which do not interact well with web pages. This paper introduces WAVES, a tool for the fast retrieval of information in a web page for blind and visually impaired people. The paper describes the WAVES prototype, a system that performs a page restructuring of webpages. The system analyzes webpages, identifies elements of interests from a webpage, evaluates their importance by using semantic information and visual cues, sorts them by importance and uses them to restructure the webpage so that data from the original webpage are presented to the reader in a concise format. A preliminary evaluation test of the prototype syst...

2002

The annotation of web pages, and the possibility to share the notes with others, seems to be a powerful tool. Although several tools already provide such possibility, they are not as widely popular as one would expect them to be. We try to explain this fact, and propose a novel architectural approach that is, in our view, particularly suited to some particular domain such as e-learning. We also present a tool that implements the proposed architecture.

2013 International Conference on Signal-Image Technology & Internet-Based Systems, 2013

The problems of Web data accessibility and navigation for blind users have become an active research field for the past decade. Many techniques have been created to solve them, some are hardware based and others are software based. Yet, the Web is rapidly evolving toward the far-anticipated Semantic Web (SW): a revolutionary vision extending Web information with well-defined meaning so that it becomes more easily accessible by human users and automated processes. As a result, SW technological breakthroughs such as ontologies and semantic data description, as well as data representation and manipulation technologies (i.e., RDF, OWL, and SPARQL) are being recently explored to improve data accessibility for blind Web surfers. In this paper, we briefly explore existing studies targeting Web data accessibility for blind users, ranging from traditional techniques (Braille output, screen readers, etc.) toward semantically enhanced techniques (using SW technologies). Then, we present an ongoing framework, exploring SW technologies (namely RDF, RDFa and OWL) in order to improve the representation of heterogeneous Web pages (typically pages not conforming to the W3C recommendations for Web page design), adapting the document's contents and presentation so that it best fits the blind user's needs.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2010

In this paper, we introduce Linkator, an application architecture that exploits semantic annotations for automatically adding links to previously generated web pages. Linkator provides a mechanism for dereferencing these semantic annotations with what it calls semantic links. Automatically adding links to web pages improves the users' navigation. It connects the visited page with external sources of information that the user can be interested in, but that were not identified as such during the web page design phase. The process of auto-linking encompasses: finding the terms to be linked and finding the destination of the link. Linkator delegates the first stage to external semantic annotation tools and it concentrates on the process of finding a relevant resource to link to. In this paper, a use case is presented that shows how this mechanism can support knowledge workers in finding publications during their navigation on the web.

Procedia Computer Science, 2014

Requirements for Easy-to-Read Web content can be derived from various sources. The requirements cover linguistic properties as well as aspects of presentation and interaction. This paper compares different approaches to check that the Web content is understandable. A major challenge is that many guidelines are language-dependent. We describe a method to extend the coverage of an existing author support tool across multiple languages and show how this can be a first step towards common Techniques for Easy-to-Read Web content.

Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, 2007

A tool for automatic conversion for making accessible Web pages is presented. It is set in the Help to the Integration of Disabled Persons to the New Technologies field. The project tries to bring the Web to as much people as possible. To get it, we analyze HTML documents and style sheets to adequate them to the regulation of the accessibility dictated by World Wide Web Consortium. The application of this project means a substantial improvement to the access of the information contained in the Web, even though a disability is suffered or not. It improves navigation with all kinds of devices and the view of the Web contents.

2004

Abstract. Visually impaired users are hindered in their efforts to access the largest repository of electronic information in the world, namely the World Wide Web (Web). A visually impaired user's information and presentation requirements are different from a sighted user in that they are highly egocentric and non-visual.

2009

Accessibility is the possibility of any person to make use of all the benefits of society, including the Internet. As the interfaces are typically graphic, sites can be an obstacle for visually impaired persons to access. For a site to be accessible to blind persons it's necessary the information contained in the visual resources be reproduced by means of an "equivalent" textual description, capable of transmitting the same information as the visual resources. This study is aimed at identifying and defining usability guidance compliant with accessibility W3C directives that can facilitate the interaction between visually impaired and Internet and still guarantee sites with understandable navigation content. Towards this end an exploratory study was conducted, comprised of a field study and interviews with visually disabled people from Instituto Benjamin Constant, reference center in Brazil for the education of visually impaired persons, in order to get to know these users better.