Augmenting the mobility of profoundly blind Web travellers

Abstract

Use the word ‘accessibility’ in the presence of any HCI1

Human 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.

Notes

Human Computer Interaction or Computer Human Interaction (CHI).

The project name ‘Towel’ is taken from the popular novel – ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ written by Douglas Adams which states that ‘A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta … wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat … wrap it around your head to ward off noxious fumes … any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it … win through, and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.’

Mobility (as in “quality”) n. : the quality of moving freely.

… and therefore the HCI community.

In this case http://www.imdb.comhttp://www.imdb.com.

Screen magnification software enlarges the information on the screen by pre-determined incremental factor [for example, 1x magnification, 2x magnification, 3x magnification, etc,]. Magnification programs run simultaneously and seamlessly with the computer's operating system and applications.

Screen readers are special applications that vocalise the onscreen data. Pages are typically read from the top left to the bottom right, one word at a time.

Feints (as in “fake”) v. : deceive with a feint.

World Wide Web Consortium.

A Web accessibility company supplying De-Facto accessibility guidelines.

Royal National Institute for the Blind – UK Organisation.

American Foundation for the Blind – USA Organisation.

We envisage an author side annotation tool performing an automated ‘best fit’ first pass and an optional author directed ‘refinement’ pass.

Soliciting the initial formative evaluation proved easy as we did not require the user to be present at our testing location. However, finding subjects for the summative evaluation proved more difficult; we therefore had to rely on locally resident users, or perform no summative evaluation at all.

Objects that are used to provide cueing information to a user.

A more complete discussion and statistical analysis as was created in the process of testing this site (and others) (Harper 2001).