aiBrowser for Multimedia -- Introducing Multimedia Content Accessibility for Visually Impaired Users
By Miyashita, Hisashi; Sato, Daisuke; Takagi, Hironobu; Asakawa, Chieko; ASSETS 2007 - The Ninth International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, pp. 91-98Publication Date: October 15-17, 2007
Overview of aiBrowser, an accessible browser enabling visually impaired users to access multimedia content on the Web. Two major accessibility problems were addressed: (1) audio conflicts between streaming media and the synthesized speech from the assistive software; and (2) navigation problems. Problem 1 was addressed by introducing direct multimedia audio controls in aiBrowser, allowing users to control streaming media embedded in webpages with known and unchanging shortcut keys. Introducing alternative user interface with external metadata, which can be adapted to dynamic and compound Web content such as HTML and Flash, addressed Problem 2. The aiBrowser was evaluated by comparing it to the JAWS screen reader on 3 well-known multimedia-content-intensive websites, ABC News, YouTube, and Disney.com. The evaluation showed that the aiBrowser made content inaccessible with JAWS relatively accessible by using the multimedia audio controls and alternative interfaces with metadata which included alternative text and heading information. In addition, the number of keystrokes was drastically reduced with the aiBrowser. Future improvements on the browser planned include providing accessible user interfaces for email and spreadsheet applications.
Assistive Products Discussed: JAWS FOR WINDOWS
Published by: Association for Computing Machinery (Website:http://www.acm.org)
SIGACCESS (ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing) (Web Site: http://www.sigaccess.org )
