Accessmonkey: a collaborative scripting framework for web users and developers

ABSTRACT

Efficient access to web content remains elusive for individuals accessing the web using assistive technology. Previous efforts to improve web accessibility have focused on developer awareness, technological improvement, and legislation, but these approaches have left remaining concerns. First, while many tools can help produce accessible content, these tools are generally difficult to integrate into existing developer workflows and rarely offer specific suggestions that developers can implement. Second, tools that automatically improve web content for users generally solve specific problems and are difficult to combine and use on a diversity of existing assistive technology. Finally, although blind web users have proven adept at overcoming the shortcomings of the web and existing tools, they have been only marginally involved in improving the accessibility of their own web experience.

As a first step toward addressing these concerns, we introduce Accessmonkey, a common scripting framework that web users, web developers and web researchers can use to collaboratively improve accessibility. This framework advances the idea that Javascript and dynamic web content can be used to improve inaccessible content instead of being a cause of it. Using Accessmonkey, web users and developers on different platforms with potentially different goals can collaboratively make the web more accessible. In this paper we first present the Accessmonkey framework, describe three implementations of it that we have created and offer several example scripts that demonstrate its utility. We conclude by discussing future extensions of this work that will provide efficient access to scripts as users browse the web and allow non-technical users be involved in creating scripts.

REFERENCES

• 1: A-Prompt. Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC) and the TRACE Center at the University of Wisconsin. http://www.aprompt.ca/.
• 2: Greasemonkey Firefox extension. http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/.
• 3: Turnabout. Reify Software. http://www.reifysoft.com/turnabout.php.
• 4: Watchfire Bobby. http://www.watchfire.com/products/webxm/bobby.aspx.
• 5: Firefox accessibility extension, 2006. Illinois Center for Information Technology.
• 6: GW Micro Window-Eyes, 2006. http://www.gwmicro.com/Window-Eyes/.
• 7: JAWS 8.0 for windows. Freedom Scientific, 2006. http://www.freedomscientific.com.
• 8: Lift. UsableNet, 2006. http://www.usablenet.com/.
• 9: W3C markup validation service v0.7.4, 2006. http://validator.w3.org/.
• 10: Web accessibility checker. University of Toronto Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC), 2006. http://checker.atrc.utoronto.ca/.
• 11: Web content accessibility guidelines 2.0 (wcag 2.0). World Wide Web Consortium, 2006. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/.
• 12: S. Bechhofer, C. Goble, L. Carr, S. Kampa, W. Hall, and D. De Roure. Cohse: Conceptual open hypermedia service. Frontiers in Artifical Intelligence and Applications, 96, 2003.
• 13: Jeffrey P. Bigham, Increasing web accessibility by automatically judging alternative text quality, Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, January 28-31, 2007, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA [doi>10.1145/1216295.1216364]
• 14: Jeffrey P. Bigham , Ryan S. Kaminsky , Richard E. Ladner , Oscar M. Danielsson , Gordon L. Hempton, WebInSight:: making web images accessible, Proceedings of the 8th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility, October 23-25, 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1168987.1169018]
• 15: Michael Bolin , Matthew Webber , Philip Rha , Tom Wilson , Robert C. Miller, Automation and customization of rendered web pages, Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 23-26, 2005, Seattle, WA, USA [doi>10.1145/1095034.1095062]
• 16: D. R. Commission. The web: Access and inclusion for disabled people. The Stationary Office, 2004.
• 17: Simon Harper , Carole Goble , Robert Stevens , Yeliz Yesilada, Middleware to expand context and preview in hypertext, Proceedings of the 6th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility, October 18-20, 2004, Atlanta, GA, USA
• 18: Simon Harper , Neha Patel, Gist summaries for visually impaired surfers, Proceedings of the 7th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility, October 09-12, 2005, Baltimore, MD, USA [doi>10.1145/1090785.1090804]
• 19: Anita W. Huang , Neel Sundaresan, A semantic transcoding system to adapt Web services for users with disabilities, Proceedings of the fourth international ACM conference on Assistive technologies, p.156-163, November 13-15, 2000, Arlington, Virginia, United States [doi>10.1145/354324.354363]
• 20: Gennaro Iaccarino , Delfina Malandrino , Vittorio Scarano, Personalizable edge services for web accessibility, Proceedings of the 2006 international cross-disciplinary workshop on Web accessibility (W4A): Building the mobile web: rediscovering accessibility?, May 22-22, 2006, Edinburgh, U.K. [doi>10.1145/1133219.1133224]
• 21: M. Y. Ivory. Automated Web Site Evaluation Reseachers' and Practitioners' Perspectives. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003.
• 22: H. Jung, J. Allen, N. Chambers, L. Galescu, M. Swift, and W. Taysom. One-shot procedure learning from instruction and observation. In Proceedings of the International FLAIRS Conference: Special Track on Natural Language and Knowledge Representation.
• 23: Richard E. Ladner , Melody Y. Ivory , Rajesh Rao , Sheryl Burgstahler , Dan Comden , Sangyun Hahn , Matthew Renzelmann , Satria Krisnandi , Mahalakshmi Ramasamy , Beverly Slabosky , Andrew Martin , Amelia Lacenski , Stuart Olsen , Dmitri Groce, Automating tactile graphics translation, Proceedings of the 7th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility, October 09-12, 2005, Baltimore, MD, USA [doi>10.1145/1090785.1090814]
• 24: Greg Little , Robert C. Miller, Translating keyword commands into executable code, Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 15-18, 2006, Montreux, Switzerland [doi>10.1145/1166253.1166275]
• 25: Jalal U. Mahmud , Yevgen Borodin , I. V. Ramakrishnan, Csurf: a context-driven non-visual web-browser, Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, May 08-12, 2007, Banff, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/1242572.1242578]
• 26: Jennifer Mankoff , Holly Fait , Tu Tran, Is your web page accessible?: a comparative study of methods for assessing web page accessibility for the blind, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 02-07, 2005, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1054972.1054979]
• 27: R. C. Miller and B. Myers. Creating dynamic world wide web pages by demonstration, 1997.
• 28: Helen Petrie , Fraser Hamilton , Neil King, Tension, what tension?: Website accessibility and visual design, Proceedings of the 2004 international cross-disciplinary workshop on Web accessibility (W4A), May 18, 2004, New York City, New York [doi>10.1145/990657.990660]
• 29: Mark Pilgrim, Greasemonkey Hacks: Tips & Tools for Remixing the Web with Firefox (Hacks), O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2005
• 30: Peter Plessers , Sven Casteleyn , Yeliz Yesilada , Olga De Troyer , Robert Stevens , Simon Harper , Carole Goble, Accessibility: a Web engineering approach, Proceedings of the 14th international conference on World Wide Web, May 10-14, 2005, Chiba, Japan [doi>10.1145/1060745.1060799]
• 31: I. V. Ramakrishnan , Amanda Stent , Guizhen Yang, Hearsay: enabling audio browsing on hypertext content, Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web, May 17-20, 2004, New York, NY, USA [doi>10.1145/988672.988684]
• 32: Alex Safonov, Web macros by example: users managing the WWW of applications, CHI '99 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, May 15-20, 1999, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania [doi>10.1145/632716.632761]
• 33: S. R. Turner. Playtpus firefox extension, 2006. http://platypus.mozdev.org/.
• 34: M. Vorburger. Altifier: Web accessibility enhancement tool, 1999.
• 35: H. Wang. Nextplease!, 2006. http://nextplease.mozdev.org/.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.2 Social Issues

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
accessmonkey, alternative text, greasemonkey, web accessibility, web scripting, web transcoding