Luděk Bártek

Web pages for blind people — generating web-based presentations by means of dialogue

This paper deals with the problem of generating web pages by means of dialogue. The generated web presentations fully meet accessibility requirements. The basic approach is described and discussed. An illustrative example is presented as well

Is Accessibility an Issue in the Knowledge Society? Modern Web Applications in the Light of Accessibility

Recent development in Web shows a significant trend towards more user participation, massive use of new devices including portables, and high interactivity. The user participation goes hand in hand with inclusion of all potential user groups — also with special needs. However, we claim that albeit all the effort towards accessibility, it has not yet found an appopriate reflection among stakeholders of the “Top Web Applications” nor their users. This leads to undesired causes — the business-driven Web without all user participation is not a really democratic medium and, actually, does not comply with the original characteristics of Web 2.0. The paper tries to identify perspectives of further development including standardization processes and technical obstacles behind. It also shows ways and techniques to cope with the challenge based on our own research and development in accessible graphics and dialog-based systems.

WebGen System - Visually Impaired Users Create Web Pages

The aim of the WebGen system is to allow visually impaired users to create web presentations in a simple and natural way by means of dialogue. This paper describes the basic methods and principles used in the system Web-Gen, especially the system structure and the dialogue interface. An illustrative example of a dialogue is included as well as the resulting web page.

Assistive photography

Many people make photographs of places they visited and when they are browsing the collections they can not often remember the names of buildings on the pictures. There also exist people with visual impairment interested in a photography[1]. This paper deals with the algorithms and methods they can allow people with visual impairment to photograph. They allow to automatically add a semantic description of buildings on a photography and to browse the collection of photographs taken this way even by visually impaired users using the semantic description.

Generating Dialogues from the Description of Structured Data

Generating dialogues from the description of structured data is a part of the WebGen system for generating web-based presentations by means of dialogue. Although the system allows the user to create the most common presentations types, such as personal presentations or blogs, the user may need to add a new presentation type. To add a new presentation type the user must specify the content and structure of the presentation descriptor using the XML Schema, the dialogue interface used to collect requested information and finally the layout of the resulting pages. This paper discusses limitations on the XML Schema structure allowing us to generate dialogue interfaces automatically from the presentation descriptor and basic principles and algorithms used during the transformation. In addition, this paper includes some illustrative examples of the data, corresponding XML Schema, XSL Transformation, resulting VoiceXML document and experiments used to evaluate the user satisfaction with generated dialogues.