Accessible presentation of information for people with visual disabilities

Abstract

Personal computers, palm top computers, media players and cell phones provide instant access to information from around the world. There are a wide variety of options available to make that information available to people with visual disabilities, so many that choosing one for use in any given context can often feel daunting to someone new to the field of accessibility. This paper reviews tools and techniques for the presentation of textual, graphic, mathematic and web documents through audio and haptic modalities to people with visual disabilities.

Accessibility of E-Commerce Websites for Vision-Impaired Persons

“…These techniques are expensive and not suited to present dynamic content since they are immutable. These techniques and various other modes of tactile presentation is discussed in detail in [30]. …”

“…Many studies point out that non-standard page layout and embedded graphical elements make web pages more and more complex and inaccessible [30,32]. Images often appear without alternate text in many websites.…”

“…These images does not convey any information to blind users. Dynamic 13 HTML, especially JavaScript and Flash animation makes web content inaccessible [30,17].…”

“…Difficulties in navigating tabular data structures and navigation links with graphics attached not serving their purpose was discussed in a paper by C. Power and H. Jürgensen. The paper suggested to avoid the use of tables for storing layout information [30]. Since the Braille display and auditory outputs present text line by line, getting a page overview, understanding the page layout and the relation between different regions, and identifying navigation links are challenges for the blind [32].…”

“…These dynamic contents are inaccessible to visually disabled people, since screen readers are not capable of handling it. Many papers like [30,32] have mentioned contents rendered using Flash and JavaScript, graphic links etc. as a threat to accessibility.…”