On Adaptability of Web Sites for Visually Handicapped People

Abstract

Currently, the great majority of content published on the Internet is inaccessible to visually impaired users. Although designers have guidelines that guarantee the accessibility of pages constructed as well as software tools to facilitate this task, it is necessary to consider the user’s perspective too, allowing him/her to participate in the restructuring or presentation process of contents. There are few software tools which are able to do this. In this paper we present KAI (Accessibility Kit for the Internet) that considers both the user and the designer. It classifies the different components of a published Web page and presents them to the user according to his/her needs. KAI is based on a new language, BML (Blind Markup Language) that helps authors to develop better structured pages. It provides two levels of independence: original Web code and user browser or navigation platform. KAI includes a mixed audio/touch browser (WebTouch) that enables selective reading of contents. The proposed accessibility kit uses several accessibility metrics to ensure that those pages transformed by KAI are more accessible than the original ones. In this paper we give an overview of the overall system.