Annotation-based transcoding for nonvisual Web access

Abstract

These days, Web authors try to describe as much information as possible in one page using various types of visual effects. This information is visually fragmented into groupings. Blind users read the Web contents in tag order, but visually fragmented groupings are not accessible using tag order reading. In addition, the Web contents are designed to be visually appealing using a lot of images. This style makes nonvisual Web access harder. Therefore we decided to develop an annotation-based transcoding system to convert already-existing Web pages to be accessible, which works between a Web server and a user. It consists of two components, one for structural annotations and one for commentary annotations. Structural annotations are used to recognize visually fragmented groupings as well as to show the importance and basic role of each group. Commentary annotations are used to give users a useful description of each grouping. In this paper, we will describe our transcoding method for nonvisual Web access based on the annotations.