ABSTRACT
Efficient access to web content remains elusive for individuals accessing the web using assistive technology. Previous efforts to improve web accessibility have focused on developer awareness, technological improvement, and legislation, but these approaches have left remaining concerns. First, while many tools can help produce accessible content, these tools are generally difficult to integrate into existing developer workflows and rarely offer specific suggestions that developers can implement. Second, tools that automatically improve web content for users generally solve specific problems and are difficult to combine and use on a diversity of existing assistive technology. Finally, although blind web users have proven adept at overcoming the shortcomings of the web and existing tools, they have been only marginally involved in improving the accessibility of their own web experience.
As a first step toward addressing these concerns, we introduce Accessmonkey, a common scripting framework that web users, web developers and web researchers can use to collaboratively improve accessibility. This framework advances the idea that Javascript and dynamic web content can be used to improve inaccessible content instead of being a cause of it. Using Accessmonkey, web users and developers on different platforms with potentially different goals can collaboratively make the web more accessible. In this paper we first present the Accessmonkey framework, describe three implementations of it that we have created and offer several example scripts that demonstrate its utility. We conclude by discussing future extensions of this work that will provide efficient access to scripts as users browse the web and allow non-technical users be involved in creating scripts.
- A-Prompt. Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC) and the TRACE Center at the University of Wisconsin. http://www.aprompt.ca/.Google Scholar
- Greasemonkey Firefox extension. http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/.Google Scholar
- Turnabout. Reify Software. http://www.reifysoft.com/turnabout.php.Google Scholar
- Watchfire Bobby. http://www.watchfire.com/products/webxm/bobby.aspx.Google Scholar
- Firefox accessibility extension, 2006. Illinois Center for Information Technology.Google Scholar
- GW Micro Window-Eyes, 2006. http://www.gwmicro.com/Window-Eyes/.Google Scholar
- JAWS 8.0 for windows. Freedom Scientific, 2006. http://www.freedomscientific.com.Google Scholar
- Lift. UsableNet, 2006. http://www.usablenet.com/.Google Scholar
- W3C markup validation service v0.7.4, 2006. http://validator.w3.org/.Google Scholar
- Web accessibility checker. University of Toronto Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC), 2006. http://checker.atrc.utoronto.ca/.Google Scholar
- Web content accessibility guidelines 2.0 (wcag 2.0). World Wide Web Consortium, 2006. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/.Google Scholar
- S. Bechhofer, C. Goble, L. Carr, S. Kampa, W. Hall, and D. De Roure. Cohse: Conceptual open hypermedia service. Frontiers in Artifical Intelligence and Applications, 96, 2003.Google Scholar
- J. P. Bigham. Increasing web accessibility by automatically judging alternative text quality. In Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI '07), New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. P. Bigham, R. S. Kaminsky, R. E. Ladner, O. M. Danielsson, and G. L. Hempton. Webinsight: Making web images accessible. In Proceedings of 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '06), October 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Bolin, M. Webber, P. Rha, T. Wilson, and R. C. Miller. Automation and customization of rendered web pages. In Proceedings of the 18th User Interface Software and Technology, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. R. Commission. The web: Access and inclusion for disabled people. The Stationary Office, 2004.Google Scholar
- S. Harper, C. Goble, R. Stevens, and Y. Yesilada. Middleware to expand context and preview in hypertext. In Proceedings of the 6th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility (ASSETS '04), pages 63--70, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Harper and N. Patel. Gist summaries for visually impaired surfers. In Proceedings of the 7th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '05), pages 90--97, New York, NY, USA, 2005. ACM Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. W. Huang and N. Sundaresan. A semantic transcoding system to adapt web services for users with disabilities. In Proceedings of the fourth international ACM conference on Assistive technologies (Assets '00), pages 156--163, New York, NY, USA, 2000. ACM Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- G. Iaccarino, D. Malandrino, and V. Scarano. Personalizable edge services for web accessibility. In Proceedings of the 2006 international cross-disciplinary workshop on Web accessibility (W4A '06), pages 23--32, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Y. Ivory. Automated Web Site Evaluation Reseachers' and Practitioners' Perspectives. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- H. Jung, J. Allen, N. Chambers, L. Galescu, M. Swift, and W. Taysom. One-shot procedure learning from instruction and observation. In Proceedings of the International FLAIRS Conference: Special Track on Natural Language and Knowledge Representation.Google Scholar
- R. E. Ladner, M. Y. Ivory, R. Rao, S. Burgstahler, D. Comden, S. Hahn, M. Renzelmann, S. Krisnandi, M. Ramasamy, B. Slabosky, A. Martin, A. Lacenski, S. Olsen, and D. Groce. Automating tactile graphics translation. In Proceedings of the Seventh International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '05), pages 50--57, New York, NY, 2005. ACM Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- G. Little and R. C. Miller. Translating keyword commands into executable code. In UIST '06: Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, pages 135--144, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Mahmud, Y. Borordin, and I. Ramakrishnan. Csurf: A context-driven non-visual web-browser. In Proceedings of the International Conference on the World Wide Web (WWW '07). Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Mankoff, H. Fait, and T. Tran. Is your web page accessible?: a comparative study of methods for assessing web page accessibility for the blind. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '05), pages 41--50, New York, NY, USA, 2005. ACM Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. C. Miller and B. Myers. Creating dynamic world wide web pages by demonstration, 1997.Google Scholar
- H. Petrie, F. Hamilton, and N. King. Tension, what tension?: Website accessibility and visual design. In Proceedings of the international cross-disciplinary workshop on Web accessibility (W4A '04), pages 13--18, New York, NY, USA, 2004. ACM Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Pilgrim, editor. Greasemonkey Hacks: Tips & Tools for Remixing the Web with Firefox. O'Reilly Media, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- P. Plessers, S. Casteleyn, Y. Yesilada, O. D. Troyer, R. Stevens, S. Harper, and C. Goble. Accessibility: a web engineering approach. In Proceedings of the 14th international conference on World Wide Web (WWW '05), pages 353--362, New York, NY, USA, 2005. ACM Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- I. Ramakrishnan, A. Stent, and G. Yang. Hearsay: Enabling audio browsing on hypertext content. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the World Wide Web (WWW '04), 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Safonov. Web macros by example: users managing the www of applications. In CHI '99 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '99), pages 71--72, New York, NY, USA, 1999. ACM Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. R. Turner. Playtpus firefox extension, 2006. http://platypus.mozdev.org/.Google Scholar
- M. Vorburger. Altifier: Web accessibility enhancement tool, 1999.Google Scholar
- H. Wang. Nextplease!, 2006. http://nextplease.mozdev.org/.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Accessmonkey: a collaborative scripting framework for web users and developers
Recommendations
Increasing web accessibility by automatically judging alternative text quality
IUI '07: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfacesThe lack of appropriate alternative text for web images remains a problem for blind users and others accessing the web with non-visual interfaces. The content contained within web images is vital for understanding many web sites but the majority are ...
Accessmonkey: enabling and sharing end user accessibility improvements
ASSETS 2007 doctoral consortiumThis paper proposes the Accessmonkey Framework for collaborative web accessibility improvement. The goal of the system is to provide a common platform on which end users and developers can create, share and use scripts that specify accessibility ...
A language for end-user web augmentation: Caring for producers and consumers alike
Web augmentation is to the Web what augmented reality is to the physical world: layering relevant content/layout/navigation over the existing Web to customize the user experience. This is achieved through JavaScript (JS) using browser weavers (e.g., ...
Comments