Taming the inaccessible web

Abstract

Visually impaired users are hindered in their efforts to access the largest repository of electronic information in the world, namely the World Wide Web (Web). A visually impaired users information and presentation requirements are different from a sighted user in that they are highly egocentric and non-visual. These requirements can become problems in that the Web is visually centric with regard to presentation and information order/layout, this can (and does) hinder users who need presentation-agnostic access to information. Finding semantic information already encoded directly into documents can help to alleviate these problems and support users who wish to understand the content as opposed to the presentation and order of the information. If this is to happen in the "real world", however, authors must incur no "design overhead" when creating documents. Our solution, Structural-Semantics for Accessibility and Device Independence (SADIe) involves building ontologies of Cascading Sytle-Sheets (CSS) and using those ontologies to transformWeb pages. In this way we find that we can indeed "tame" inaccessible Web pages