Yevgen Borodin

More than meets the eye: a survey of screen-reader browsing strategies

Browsing the Web with screen readers can be difficult and frustrating. Web pages often contain inaccessible content that is expressed only visually or that can be accessed only with the mouse. Screen-reader users must also contend with usability challenges encountered when the reading content is designed with built-in assumptions of how it will be accessed -- generally by a sighted person on a standard display. Far from passive consumers of content who simply accept web content as accessible or not, many screen-reader users are adept at developing, discovering, and employing browsing strategies that help them overcome the accessibility and usability problems they encounter. In this paper, we overview the browsing strategies that we have observed screen-reader users employ when faced with challenges, ranging from unfamiliar web sites and complex web pages to dynamic and automatically-refreshing content. A better understanding of existing browsing strategies can inform the design of accessible websites, development of new tools that make experienced users more effective, and help overcome the initial learning curve for users who have not yet acquired effective browsing strategies.

The design of human-powered access technology

People with disabilities have always overcome accessibility problems by enlisting people in their community to help. The Internet has broadened the available community and made it easier to get on-demand assistance remotely. In particular, the past few years have seen the development of technology in both research and industry that uses human power to overcome technical problems too difficult to solve automatically. In this paper, we frame recent developments in human computation in the historical context of accessibility, and outline a framework for discussing new advances in human-powered access technology. Specifically, we present a set of 13 design principles for human-powered access technology motivated both by historical context and current technological developments. We then demonstrate the utility of these principles by using them to compare several existing human-powered access technologies. The power of identifying the 13 principles is that they will inspire new ways of thinking about human-powered access technologies.

What's new?: making web page updates accessible

Web applications facilitated by technologies such as JavaScript, DHTML, AJAX, and Flash use a considerable amount of dynamic web content that is either inaccessible or unusable by blind people. Server side changes to web content cause whole page refreshes, but only small sections of the page update, causing blind web users to search linearly through the page to find new content. The connecting theme is the need to quickly and unobtrusively identify the segments of a web page that have changed and notify the user of them. In this paper we propose Dynamo, a system designed to unify different types of dynamic content and make dynamic content accessible to blind web users. Dynamo treats web page updates uniformly and its methods encompass both web updates enabled through dynamic content and scripting, and updates resulting from static page refreshes, form submissions, and template-based web sites. From an algorithmic and interaction perspective Dynamo detects underlying changes and provides users with a single and intuitive interface for reviewing the changes that have occurred. We report on the quantitative and qualitative results of an evaluation conducted with blind users. These results suggest that Dynamo makes access to dynamic content faster, and that blind web users like it better than existing interfaces.

The HearSay non-visual web browser

This paper describes HearSay, a non-visual Web browser, featuring context-directed browsing, a unique and innovative Web accessibility feature, and an extensible VoiceXML dialog interface. The browser provides most of the standard browsing functionalities, including flexible navigation and form-filling. The paper also outlines future work aiming to make the Web more accessible for individuals with visual impairments.

Accessibility commons: a metadata infrastructure for web accessibility

Research projects, assistive technology, and individuals all create metadata in order to improve Web accessibility for visually impaired users. However, since these projects are disconnected from one another, this metadata is isolated in separate tools, stored in disparate repositories, and represented in incompatible formats. Web accessibility could be greatly improved if these individual contributions were merged. An integration method will serve as the bridge between future academic research projects and end users, enabling new technologies to reach end users more quickly. Therefore we introduce Accessibility Commons, a common infrastructure to integrate, store, and share metadata designed to improve Web accessibility. We explore existing tools to show how the metadata that they produce could be integrated into this common infrastructure, we present the design decisions made in order to help ensure that our common repository will remain relevant in the future as new metadata is developed, and we discuss how the common infrastructure component facilitates our broader social approach to improving accessibility.

Towards one world web with HearSay3

In this paper, we present the key functionalities of HearSay 3, a non-visual web browser designed with the goal of improving web accessibility across the world. The featured functionalities include transparent support for multiple languages, collaborative labeling that harnesses the power of the social web, and a usable interface for handling dynamic web content.

Hearsay: a new generation context-driven multi-modal assistive web browser

This demo will present HearSay, a multi-modal non-visual web browser, which aims to bridge the growing Web Accessibility divide between individuals with visual impairments and their sighted counterparts, and to facilitate full participation of blind individuals in the growing Web-based society.

A General Approach for Partitioning Web Page Content Based on Geometric and Style Information

In this paper, we describe a general-purpose approach for partitioning Web page content. The novelty of our approach lies in the use of detailed layout information from a Web page renderer to determine spatial locality and identify visual separators, and the use of relaxed matching over presentation style information to determine presentation style similarity. We present several examples to illustrate the generality of our approach.

Combating information overload in non-visual web access using context

Web sites are designed for graphical mode of interaction. Sighted users can visually segment Web pages and quickly identify relevant information. In contrast, visually-disabled individuals have to use screen readers to browse the Web. Screen readers process pages sequentially and read through everything, making Web browsing time-consuming and strenuous. The use of shortcut keys and searching offers some improvements, but the problem still remains. In this paper, we address this problem using the notion of context. When a user follows a link, we capture the context of the link, and use it to identify relevant information on the next page. The content of this page is rearranged, so that the relevant information is read out first. We conducted a series experiments to compare the performance of our prototype system with the state-of-the-art JAWS screen reader. Our results show that the use of context can potentially save browsing time as well as improve browsing experience of visually disabled individuals.

Automation of repetitive web browsing tasks with voice-enabled macros

Non-visual aural web browsing remains inefficient as compared to regular browsing with visual modalities. This paper proposes an approach for automation of repetitive browsing tasks by using personalized macros, which are easy to record and replay with a speech-enabled interface. The prototype system is implemented in the framework of the HearSay non-visual web browser.