Abstract
Internet accessibility for the visually impaired community is still an open issue. Guidelines have been issued by the W3C consortium to help web designers to improve web site accessibility. However several studies show that a significant percentage of web page creators are still ignoring the proposed guidelines. Several tools are now available, general purpose, or web specific, to help visually impaired readers. But is reading a web page enough? Regular sighted users are able to scan a web page for a particular piece of information at high speeds. Shouldn’t visually impaired readers have the same chance? This paper discusses some features already implemented to improve accessibility and presents a user feedback report regarding the AudioBrowser, a talking browser. Based on the user feedback the paper also suggests some avenues for future work in order to make talking browsers and screen readers compatible.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Fernandes, A. R., Martins, F. M., Paredes, H., and Pereira, J. (2001). A different approach to real web accessibility. In Stephanidis, C., editor, Universal Access in H.C.I., Proceedings of HCI International 2001, volume 3, pages 723–727. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Filepp, R., Challenger, J., and Rosu, D. (2002). Improving the accessibility of aurally rendered html tables. In Proceedings of the fifth international ACM conference on Assistive technologies, pages 9–16. ACM Press.
IBM (2000). Web accessibility transcoding system. http://www.trl.ibm.com/projects/acc_tech/attrans_e.htm.
Jackson-Sanborn, E., Odess-Harnish, K., and Warren, N. (2002). Website accessibility: A study of ada compliance. Technical Report Technical Reports TR-2001-05, University of North Carolina ŰChapel Hill, School of Information and Library Science, http://ils.unc.edu/ils/research/reports/accessibility.pdf.
Rowan, M., Gregor, P., Sloan, D., and Booth, P. (2000). Evaluating web resources for disability access. In Proceedings of ASSETS 2000, pages 13–15. ACM, ACM Press.
Stevens, R. D. and Edwards, A. D. N. (1996). An approach to the evaluation of assistive technology. In Proceedings of ASSETS’ 96, pages 64–71. ACM, ACM Press.
Sullivan, T. and Matson, R. (2000). Barriers to use: Usability andcontent accessibility on the webŠs most popular sites. In Proceedings on the conference on universal usability, 2000, pages 139–144. ACM Press.
Zajicek, M., Venetsanopoulos, I., and Morrissey, W. (2000). Web access for visually impaired people using active accessibility. In Proc International Ergonomics Association 2000/HFES 2000.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer
About this paper
Cite this paper
Fernandes, A.R., Pereira, J.R., Campos, J.C. (2006). Accessibility and Visually Impaired Users. In: Seruca, I., Cordeiro, J., Hammoudi, S., Filipe, J. (eds) Enterprise Information Systems VI. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3675-2_37
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3675-2_37
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-3674-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-3675-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)