Augmenting the mobility of profoundly blind Web travellers

Abstract

Use the word ‘accessibility’ in the presence of any HCI1Human Computer Interaction or Computer Human Interaction (CHI). specialist and they will immediately think of creating open interfaces that can be accessed both visually and audibly. Further, mention ‘accessability’ to any forward thinking group of Web developers and they will start to quote the Web Accessability Initiative Guidelines (WAI) and extol the virtues of accessability checking tools like ‘Bobby’. Either way, both groups will focus on the obviously important area of ‘sensory translation’ but will miss one fundamental truth; profoundly blind people interact with their environment in a markedly different way from that of sighted individuals. We have realized that the ease of movement (mobility) around systems and information space (the hypertext/Web docuverse) is central to good accessibility; and that to achieve this we require additional mobility semantics within systems and information as a way of enhancing the user experience. By adding small amounts of information to existing Web pages (semi-) automatically, we can show significant improvements in the amount of information profoundly blind users are able to access in a given time; in effect ‘levelling the playing field’ with sighted users. This paper discusses our work and demonstrates how we can make such a claim.

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