How Web 2.0 Supports the Accessibility for the Visual Impaired People - Term Paper Example

How Web 2.0 supports the Accessibility for the Visual Impaired People The past of the web was very static and non-participative in nature for the users. Then a new era of interactivity evolved into web 2.0; which provided new opportunities to explore the web and communicate with the world. With the advent of interactivity, new problems for the blind users have also emerged. Various solutions have been proposed to tackle these matters to increase the accessibility, some of the solutions and systems shall be discussed in this report. Keywords: Web 2.0, accessibility, interactivity, blind user. Introduction The history of the hypertext has been very rich and has witnessed many transitions since its inception. The early systems developed for hypertext were massive and closed, however the modern researchers and developers have introduced more openness and flexibility in the current system. The current systems can be integrated with different tools for example text editors, browsers etc. Hypertext, at first was not coupled with such graphical support as we experience in the current systems [2]. Overview Vannevar Bush can be termed as the ‘grandfather’ of hypertext as he was the man who proposed a system ‘Memex’ 1 in 1945, which we now describe as hypertext system. This idea was devised due to his worries about the scientific information overload and incapability for even the specialist to follow the developments in a particular field. Then after twenty years, Doug Engelbart started his work in 1962 towards such ideas. In 1965, the word hypertext was 1 http://www.useit.com/jakob/mmhtbook.html given by ‘Ted Nelson’; who is known as an early hypertext pioneer. He developed the Xanadu system with the basic idea that everything that anybody has ever written should be under one medium to facilitate comprehensive research. A very well known commercial product ‘Knowledge Management System’ came out in 1983; it was meant to manage large hypertexts with tens of thousands of nodes. Then in 1986; Guide became the first well-known commercial hypertext system; it was released for Macintosh. Guide had the support for 3 different types of hypertext link: Replacement, pop-ups and jumps. Then finally the 1990’s witnessed rapid development in hypertext under the specifications of Tim Berners-Lee; Mosaic became the widely used browser for WWW in Jan 1993. The main difference of success of WWW as compared to Xanadu has been its open system nature and ability of backwards compatibility with legacy data [18]. Mike Paciello, who is the man behind the accessibility resource website “WebABLE” 1 ; states that the web has gone through a paradigm shift resulting in subsequent evolution that has increased access to more information and people [6]. This evolution can be stated as the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 2. Web 1.0 can be understood as an information space that was considered more “static”. The posting of any information on the web pages lied in the hands of the web developers and web designers [10]. In the early years of this century, the concept of Web 2.0 was devised. O’Reily explains it to be “much more than just pasting a new user interface onto an old application” [11]. It is not a separate entity than Web 1.0; it’s just a new way to make use of the web [27]. Web 2.0 has emerged as a new age of social interaction, interactive web pages, shopping, filling in forms and visual enhancement [5], [12], [16]. 1 http://www.webable.com/mp-pwdca.html 2 http://radar.oreilly.com/research/web2-report.html It has given birth to a WIMP 1 (Windows, Icon, Mouse, and Pointer) interface [8]. However some of this revolution has also brought more problems for the blind users due to the focus on visual imaging, CAPTCHAs 2 etc. According to a study by Sullivan et al [7]; 50 most popular websites were scrutinized for their accessibility for the visually impaired. It was concluded that more than half were partially accessible or completely inaccessible. The websites that are customized for the usage by the blind people are called Aural Websites 3 [4] Efforts to Increase Accessibility Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) circulated the Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) in 1998, to guide the web developers to make their websites more accessible [13], [14]. Past of the Web for Blind Users E-business Asakawa [13] studied the use of Alt text with the images available on the corporate websites. Alt text is a HTML code that enables an image to have a text for its explanation/label [15]. Without these tags blind people tend to get lost on the web, not knowing what link they are clicking. However another study was carried out by Loicano et al [19] of 45 most popular online product websites and concluded that only 7 could be termed accessible. E-Learning Talib et al. studied a number of higher education websites meant for e-learning, from 1997-2002 and concluded that these websites were becoming more inaccessible with the advent of more 1 http://www.sciencedirect.com 2 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org 3 http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/WSE.2007.4380250 [13] Figure 1. Increasing use of images and transition of the number of images without alternative texts. complexity in terms of the visual display [17]. Government websites Choudrie et al [20] carried out an investigative study on e-Government portals and concluded that the respective websites still lacked the practices to make them perfectly accessible for the blind people. Present of the Web E-business Internet is now not just a medium to exchange emails and docs; it has started playing a vital role in e-commerce [9]. Many solutions have been proposed for Web 2.0 to increase the accessibility; Charles et al suggested that a dynamic speech interface can be designed in which the user would be able to speak words from a selected list of words [26]. The companies that offer online services have introduced the systems “CAPTCHA” 1 ,which are systems to tell human and computer apart [21], [25]. Shahreza, M et al [21] has proposed an approach to transform the 1 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org “CAPTCHA” for the blind people. Instead of an image, a small mathematical problem is generated by specific patterns and converted to audio by Text-to-Speech (TTS) system. The blind user will be able to easily solve the mathematical problem and enter the number to gain further access in the process of shopping online. Social Networking: Web 2.0 has enabled a whole new dimension of media-sharing, social software and blogging [33]. The blind people seek this as an opportunity to interact with people at an equal level without their disability being disclosed to anyone [22]. XHTML 1 is a new approach that can be applied to a wide variety of platforms; special attention can be paid to accessibility and device- independence [32]. Flash animations and video clips are found almost everywhere on the internet, especially on social networking websites. [13] Fig.2 1 http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/ A multimodal approach has been proposed by [25] to provide accessibility to video animations for blind users. He suggests the usage of haptic devices such as tactile mouse or tactile display boards; the information can be transferred on these devices by providing a simple animation with the help of rapidly changing the height of the active pins. E-learning Many courses are available online that have overcome the barriers that are faced by blind people. Students utilize speech synthesizers which are coupled with screen readers [3], [29], [30]; these give a speech version of the text available on the computer display and read the text label for images [23]. There are a number of e-learning opportunities like Blackboard 2, WebCT etc; to give an equal opportunity for blind e-learners [22]. WebCT 1 provides different formats of the same documents and auditory version of lectures so that blind users do not feel troubled [24]. Government Websites Government websites pose a challenge for the blind users since they have a lot of information in the form of tables. Due to this type of inaccessibility, some useful approaches have been proposed. WebAIM has made some useful contribution to increase the accessibility for tables and forms [10]. Whereas, Yesilada [31] proposed a small table browser by the name of EVITA 3 (Enabling Visually Impaired Table Access); this enabled non-visual table browsing and reading. Future of the Web for Blind Users Social Networking and E-Business AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML); is the technology that prevails on most social and 1 www.kennesaw.edu/stu_dev/dsss/webct.ppt 2 www.blackboard.com 3http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1028635&dl=GUIDE&coll=GUIDE&CFID=66118645&CFTOKEN=82053785 browsers will become more intelligent; two or three commands would be entered in the browsers and left to the computer to understand the commands and perform them [28]. Voice browsers will also improve to facilitate increase in accessibility. Since more companies are becoming aware of their social responsibility to make websites more accessible [1] and the realization that they are losing a large clientele due to their negligence on the matter. E-Learning Ramakrishnan et al [27] pointed out an area in which research will be beneficial for the future. He stated that the problem that is witnessed with these screen readers is that they are unable to transmit the logical arrangement and semantics of the text on the web page. Further research will be done in this area to resolve this matter. Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) heading tags (h1, h2 ...) are very important to portray the structure of the page to the blind user; therefore this feature has to be promoted more during the development of websites [32]. Government Websites The efforts of the government websites to introduce interactivity and latest technologies in their design are commendable; however in the need of doing such work they often overlook one of the basic element of their functionality which is to provide e-customer-service-criteria (encapsulating quality and accessibility). More research should be done to provide a better citizen relationship management, while keeping the issue of accessibility provisions for the blind users [34]. Further Reading Accessibility has been improved in the past few years but more development is needed in this respect. Only few systems and solutions could be discussed here. More literature shall be studied regarding the solutions for visual animation accessibility, voice browsers performances in web 2.0. Future of the accessibility for blind users shall also be studied in detail. Conclusion Web 2.0 can be considered as a platform rather than a media since users can conveniently read/write content on it. Much development has been witnessed in the new age of Web 2.0 to increase the accessibility for the blind users since information should be available on the same level for all types of users. 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