TITLE: Improving Web Accessibility for Visually Handicapped People Using KAI

AUTHORS(s) & AFFILIATION(s): Mercedes Macías, Fernando Sánchez., Departamento de Informática, Universidad de Extremadura, Spain

KEYWORD(s): Accessibility, Internet navigation, visually handicapped people

PRESENTER / CONTACT PERSON: Mercedes Macías

CONTACT EMAIL:

ABSTRACT:

Currently, the great majority of content published on the Internet is not accessible to users with some visual handicap. In order to avoid this situation, Web designers have at their disposal some guidelines that guarantee the accessibility of pages constructed as well as software tools developed to facilitate this design process. However, this perspective is not sufficient since it is also necessary to consider the user's point of view, allowing him/her to participate in the filtration, reestructuration or presentation process of Web pages to visit, and there are very few software tools able to do this. KAI, an Accessibility Kit for the Internet, the proposal presented in this paper, considers both the final user and the designer. KAI detects the structure of a published Web page, classifies the different elements and presents them to the user according to his/her needs. Meanwhile, it improves, wherever possible, the accessibility of the contents. KAI is based on a new language called BML (Blind Markup Language) that lends authors to develop better structured pages. In addition, BML provides two levels of independence; on the one hand, independence of the original Web code and on the other hand, independence of the final user navigation platform. KAI includes an audio/touch browser that enables the selective access to the contents of a Web page.

Last modified October 29, 2001 by .