Aurion
08.07.08, 17:48
IBM launched on Tuesday an application that seeks to harness the power and time of Internet users around the globe to make the Web more accessible to the visually impaired.
Many blind or partially sighted users run screen reading software that describes the content of a Web page but often encounter problems. The screen readers rely on text or descriptive tags to explain the items on a page but these are often added as an after thought or are incomplete.
Using the new IBM software users can report these problems to a central database and ask for additional descriptive text to be added to a site. Other Internet users that want to contribute can then check the database, select one of the submitted problems and "start fixing it" by added text labels. The additional information isn't incorporated into the original site's HTML code but into a metadata file that is loaded each time a visually impaired user subsequently visits the site.
"This idea came from my own experience with inaccessible Web sites," said Chieko Asakawa, a researcher at IBM in Tokyo who led a six-person team on development of the software. Asakawa is blind herself so knows well the problems of navigating the Web and its increasing rich multimedia pages.
Source :
PC World - IBM Software Enhances Web Accessibility for the Blind (http://www.pcworld.com/article/148052/ibm_software_enhances_web_accessibility_for_the_bl ind.html)
Many blind or partially sighted users run screen reading software that describes the content of a Web page but often encounter problems. The screen readers rely on text or descriptive tags to explain the items on a page but these are often added as an after thought or are incomplete.
Using the new IBM software users can report these problems to a central database and ask for additional descriptive text to be added to a site. Other Internet users that want to contribute can then check the database, select one of the submitted problems and "start fixing it" by added text labels. The additional information isn't incorporated into the original site's HTML code but into a metadata file that is loaded each time a visually impaired user subsequently visits the site.
"This idea came from my own experience with inaccessible Web sites," said Chieko Asakawa, a researcher at IBM in Tokyo who led a six-person team on development of the software. Asakawa is blind herself so knows well the problems of navigating the Web and its increasing rich multimedia pages.
Source :
PC World - IBM Software Enhances Web Accessibility for the Blind (http://www.pcworld.com/article/148052/ibm_software_enhances_web_accessibility_for_the_bl ind.html)