New Accessibility Developments – Giving Voice to the Web

Last week saw the emergence of three intriguing technologies in the areas of website vocalization and Web 2.0 usage among people with disabilities.

IBM Social Accessibility Project

Users who are blind rely on screen reading software to interpret text-based data from Web pages, but sites that aren’t coded correctly can cause translation difficulties. IBM researchers have begun to resolve this problem by creating a tool that allows user redirection of page content.

Through IBM’s Social Accessibility Project, sighted users provide navigational and directional context to web pages. This data is then stored back to the servers, intended to be interpreted by screen readers when the page is loaded on subsequent visits. A short YouTube video describes how this is done:

In reading about this technology, I couldn’t help thinking of a similar prototype dependent upon the social interaction of sighted users. Virtual Worlds User Interface for the Blind is an accessible rich Internet application that provides navigation and communication functionality through semantically tagged objects. The annotations are assigned by sighted users and then picked up by screen readers when a blind person visits Second Life.

BrowseAloud

Telefónica O2 Ireland, a mobile services provider, announced the release of a free download called BrowseAloud for users with mild visual impairments, learning disabilities and low literacy skills. BrowseAloud provides users the ability to read hyperlinks, textual data in images, HTML pages and documents saved in PDF format.

For more information about where accessibility in mobile technology might be heading, the O2 accessibility page and National Disability Authority site on phone and broadband accessibility might be of interest. There you’ll find information on such text-to-voice services as Textphone and SMS to Speech.

Web 2.0 Accessibility Toolkit

Researchers from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton have developed an application that tests the accessibility of Web 2.0 sites. Blogs, wikis, Facebook and other social networking tools can now be examined via a browser-based accessibility tool kit or a USB thumb drive.

This could be the beginning of an important trend in digital accessibility — the reading dynamic content that cannot be easily interpreted through a simple emulator. According to the researchers, this is the first time that such a method for evaluating Web 2.0 accessibility has been introduced:

According to Dr. Mike Wald (of the Learning Societies Lab within the University), [this] is the first time that there has been a systematic way to evaluate and provide the results of accessibility testing of web services. A key feature of the tool kit is ‘Study Bar’, which works with all browsers and reads text aloud, spell checks, and offers a dictionary, text enlargement, colour and font changes. Study Bar can be used with web services like blogs and Twitter, which has not been possible before without specialist-installed assistive technologies.

The tool kit is currently in beta and undergoing a month of testing by University of Southampton students, after which it will be more widely distributed.