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abstract

WebAnywhere: a screen reading interface for the web on any computer

Published: 21 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Fulfilling the promise of a web-enabled global community means enabling blind web users to access their information and collaborative web services wherever they happen to be on whatever computer to which they happen to have access. Whether they're checking their email at a local internet café, using an airport kiosk to connect with a new business contact on a social networking site, or collaboratively editing a document in a hotel business center, blind web users need to stay connected to be successful. While web-enabled computers are everywhere, screen readers are installed on very few. Downloading and installing new software can take a long time and is difficult without a screen reading interface, and many will not allow users to download and install new software at all. Accessible mobile devices are prohibitively expensive. WebAnywhere is a free screen-reading web application capable of making the web accessible to blind users on any web-enabled computer or device, regardless of platform or browser used, without installing new software.

References

[1]
Bigham et al. WebAnywhere: A Screen Reader On-the-Go. W4A 2008.
[2]
Mankoff et al. Is your web page accessible?: a comparative study of methods for assessing web page accessibility for the blind. CHI 2005.

Cited By

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  • (2020)"All in the Same Boat": Tradeoffs of Voice Assistant Ownership for Mixed-Visual-Ability FamiliesProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376225(1-14)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
  • (2011)How voice augmentation supports elderly web usersThe proceedings of the 13th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility10.1145/2049536.2049565(155-162)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2011
  • (2008)Access and EmpowermentACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/1408760.14087651:2(1-5)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2008

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  1. WebAnywhere: a screen reading interface for the web on any computer

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      W4A '08: Proceedings of the 2008 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility (W4A)
      April 2008
      207 pages
      ISBN:9781605581538
      DOI:10.1145/1368044
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 21 April 2008

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      Author Tags

      1. blind users
      2. screen reader
      3. web accessibility

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      W4A '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 12 of 29 submissions, 41%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 171 of 371 submissions, 46%

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      Cited By

      View all
      • (2020)"All in the Same Boat": Tradeoffs of Voice Assistant Ownership for Mixed-Visual-Ability FamiliesProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376225(1-14)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
      • (2011)How voice augmentation supports elderly web usersThe proceedings of the 13th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility10.1145/2049536.2049565(155-162)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2011
      • (2008)Access and EmpowermentACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/1408760.14087651:2(1-5)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2008

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