Proxy Service to Contextualize Web Browsing for the Visually Impaired

Abstract

According to World Health Organization (WHO), in June, 2012 there were 285 million Visually Impaired People (VIP) around the world. Unfortunately, many face difficulties when browsing and getting information from the Internet especially when using traditional methods. In our paper, we aim at taking advantage of context-aware computing to assist VIP with contextualized web pages. We propose an integrable proxy service to minimize VIP's browsing problems and make it more effective. This service can reorganize the requested Web page content according to the user's preferences, so screen readers would not read content that is not of interest to the user. The result of the proxy was evaluated using two approaches: (1) manual inspection and (2) user testing. In the first experiment, 64% of the 50 converted websites got satisfactory results. In the second experiment, five VIP have tested the output of our service and expressed their general satisfaction with it.

Enhancing web accessibility by implementing context aware proxy

“…In this paper, we present a proxy service that adapts web pages and presents them in a usable way to visually impaired users. Our visually impaired people (VIP)-aware proxy (Al-Mouh et al , 2013) functions as an agent and presents a service that can quickly retrieve key information from any web page.…”