Accessibility: a Web engineering approach

ABSTRACT

Currently, the vast majority of web sites do not support accessibility for visually impaired users. Usually, these users have to rely on screen readers: applications that sequentially read the content of a web page in audio. Unfortunately, screen readers are not able to detect the meaning of the different page objects, and thus the implicit semantic knowledge conveyed in the presentation of the page is lost. One approach described in literature to tackle this problem, is the Dante approach, which allows semantic annotation of web pages to provide screen readers with extra (semantic) knowledge to better facilitate the audio presentation of a web page. Until now, such annotations were done manually, and failed for dynamic pages. In this paper, we combine the Dante approach with a web design method, WSDM, to fully automate the generation of the semantic annotation for visually impaired users. To do so, the semantic knowledge gathered during the design process is exploited, and the annotations are generated as a by-product of the design process, requiring no extra effort from the designer.

References

1. Access and inclusion for disabled people. Technical report, Disability Rights Commission (DRC), 2004.]]
2. Asakawa, C., Takagi, H. Annotation-based transcoding for nonvisual web access. In ASSETS'00, pages 172--179, 2000.]]
3. Buyukkokten, O., Garcia-Molina, H., Paepcke, A. Accordion summarization for end-game browsing on pdas and cellular phones. In CHI 2001, pages 213--220, 2001.]]
4. Chen, Y., Ma, W., Zhang, H. Detecting web page structure for adaptive viewing on small form factor devices. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference, 2003.]]
5. Chen, J., Zhou, B., Shi, J., Zhang, H., Wu, Q. Function-based object towards website adaptation. In Proceedings of the Tenth International World Wide Web Conference, Hong Kong, 2001.]]
6. Ciravegna, F., Dingli, A., Petrelli, D., Wilks, Y. User-System Cooperation in Document Annotation based on Information Extraction. In 13th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 02), Spain, 2002.]]
7. Ceri, S., Fraternali, P., Bongio, A. Web Modeling Language (WebML): a modeling language for designing Web sites, In Proceedings of the Ninth World Wide Web Conference, 2000.]]
8. De Troyer, O., Leune, C. WSDM: A User-Centered Design Method for Web Sites, In Proceedings of the Seventh International World Wide Web Conference, pages 85--94, 1998.]]
9. De Troyer, O., Casteleyn, S. Designing Localized Web Sites, In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE2004), pages 547--560, 2004.]]
10. Frasincar, F., Houben, G., Vdovjak, R. Specification Framework for Engineering Adaptive Web Applications, In Proceedings of the Eleventh International World Wide Web Conference, 2002.]]
11. Gómez, J., Cachero, C., Pastor, O. Extending an Object-Oriented Conceptual Modelling Approach to Web Application Design, In Proceedings of CAiSE'2000, LNCS 1789, Pages 79--93, Stockholm, 2000.]]
12. Handschuh, S., Staab, S. Annotation for the Semantic Web, OIS Press, 2003.]]
13. Handschuh, S., Staab, S., Maedche, A. CREAM - Creating Relational Metadata with a Component based, Ontology Driven Framework. In Proceedings of K-Cap, Victoria, Canada, 2001.]]
14. Heflin, J., Hendler, J. Searching the web with SHOE. Artificial Intelligence for Web Search. Papers from the AAAI Workshop. WS-00-01, AAAI Press, pages 35--40, 2000.]]
15. Hori, M., Ono, K., Koyanagi, T., Abel, M. Annotation by transformation for the automatic generation. In Pervasive 2002, pages 267--281, 2002.]]
16. Lowe, D., Hall, W. Hypermedia and the Web: An Engineering Approach. John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 1998.]]
17. Paterno, F. Model-Based Design and Evaluation of Interactive Applications, eds. Ray, P., Thomas, P., Kuljis, J., Springer-Verlag Londen Berlin Heidelberg, ISBN 1-85233-155-0, 2000.]]
18. Plessers, P., De Troyer, O. Annotation for the Semantic Web during Website Development, In Proceedings of the ICWE 2004 Conference, pages 349--353, 2004.]]
19. Schwabe, D., Rossi, G., Barbosa, S. Systematic Hypermedia Application Design with OOHDM, In Proceedings of ACM Hypertext'96 Conference, pages 116--128, 1996.]]
20. Shao, Z., Capra, R., Pérez-Quiñones, M. Transcoding HTML to VoiceXML Using Annotation, In Proceedings of 15th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI'03) Sacramento, California, USA, 2003.]]
21. Takagi, H., Asakawa, C., Fukuda, K., Maeda, J. Site-wide annotation: Reconstructing existing pages to be accessible. In ASSETS'02, pages 81--88, 2002.]]
22. Yesilada, Y., Harper, S., Goble, G., Stevens, R. Screen Readers Cannot See (Ontology Based Semantic Annotation for Visually Impaired Web Travellers). In ICWE 2004 Proceedings, pages 445--458, 2004.]]
23. Yesilada, Y., Stevens, R., Goble, C. A foundation for tool based mobility support for visually impaired web users. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference, pages 422--430, 2003.]]

Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Document management and text processing

    • Document preparation

      • Multi / mixed media creation

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction paradigms

      • Hypertext / hypermedia

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Computing profession

      • Assistive technologies

  • User characteristics

    • People with disabilities