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Keysurf: a character controlled browser for people with physical disabilities

Published: 21 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

For many users with a physical or motor disability, using a computer mouse or other pointing device to navigate the web is cumbersome or impossible due to problems with pointing accuracy. At the same time, web accessibility using a keyboard in major browsers is rudimentary, requiring many key presses to select links or other elements. We introduce KeySurf, a character controlled web navigation system which addresses this situation by presenting an interface which allows a user to activate any web page element with only two or three keystrokes. Through an implementation of a user-centric incremental search algorithm, elements are matched according to user expectation as characters are entered into the interface. We show how our interface can be integrated with a speech recognition input, as well as with specialized on-screen keyboards for people with disabilities. Using the user's browsing history, we improve the efficiency of the selection process and find potentially interesting page links for the user within the current web page. We present the results from a pilot study evaluating the performance of various components of our system.

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  • (2022)User’s Emotion Profiling in Web Browsing BehaviorAdvances in Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems10.1007/978-3-031-14627-5_1(1-8)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2022
  • (2018)Bridging the accessibility gap in Open Educational ResourcesUniversal Access in the Information Society10.5555/3288381.328839017:4(755-774)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2018
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cover image ACM Conferences
WWW '08: Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
April 2008
1326 pages
ISBN:9781605580852
DOI:10.1145/1367497
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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Publication History

Published: 21 April 2008

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Author Tags

  1. keyboard access
  2. web accessibility
  3. web navigation

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Methodological Standards in Accessibility Research on Motor Impairments: A SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/354350955:7(1-35)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2022
  • (2022)User’s Emotion Profiling in Web Browsing BehaviorAdvances in Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems10.1007/978-3-031-14627-5_1(1-8)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2022
  • (2018)Bridging the accessibility gap in Open Educational ResourcesUniversal Access in the Information Society10.5555/3288381.328839017:4(755-774)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2018
  • (2017)On Automated Generation of Keyboard Layout to Reduce Finger-Travel DistanceInternational Journal of Monitoring and Surveillance Technologies Research10.4018/IJMSTR.20170401035:2(29-43)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2017
  • (2017)Bridging the accessibility gap in Open Educational ResourcesUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-017-0529-917:4(755-774)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2017
  • (2017)BCI Augmented Text Entry Mechanism for People with Special NeedsIntelligent Human Computer Interaction10.1007/978-3-319-52503-7_7(81-93)Online publication date: 24-Jan-2017
  • (2015)Co-designing a speech interface for people with dysarthriaJournal of Assistive Technologies10.1108/JAT-10-2014-00269:3(159-173)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2015
  • (2012)The framework of a people recommender based on a time series of user preferencesProceedings of the 2012 workshop on Data-driven user behavioral modelling and mining from social media10.1145/2390131.2390137(13-14)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2012
  • (2012)User Preference Profiling Based on Speech Recognition for Personalized RecommendationProceedings of the 2012 Seventh International Conference on Broadband, Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications10.1109/BWCCA.2012.58(308-315)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2012
  • (2011)An adaptive learning book system based on user's study interestProceedings of 2011 IEEE Pacific Rim Conference on Communications, Computers and Signal Processing10.1109/PACRIM.2011.6033004(842-847)Online publication date: Aug-2011
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