HELP:Listen to a website

Discovering new design solutions for Web accessibility

Paolo Paolini, Nicoletta Di Blas, Politecnico di Milano (Italy)

Marco Speroni

Università della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland)

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The WEB is essentially VISUAL

• Large amount of information in one page

• Kind of content recognizable by colour, position, size

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They navigate content through a screen-reader

• Web pages’ content is too complex • The graphic’s semantics is lost• Lists of items are unusable• The command “back” means… having the whole

page read again!

Implications for Visually impaired people

When Web pages are “read”:

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W3C guidelines

“Priority 1: provide a text equivalent for every non-text element”

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W3C Standard 1/2

• CONTENT GUIDELINES– Quite satisfactory

• LABELS/INTERFACE– Details satisfactory– Overall organization revising

• OVERALL ORGANISATION & NAVIGATION– Lacking! (but for generic recommendation)

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W3C Standard 2/2

• It is a “must”• It is not the final answer at all!

Applications following the standard not necessarily are accessible (in most cases they are not)

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Our approach: WED (WEb as Dialogue)

Human-computer interaction interpreted as a dialogue

I am interested in Munch

I can tell you about his life, his prints, his…

Tell me about the prints

A joint initiative of the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and the University of Lugano (Switzerland)

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WED Approach

• Focus on information intensive web sites (e.g. cultural heritage)

• Compare similar human-human dialogues

• Bring linguistic models in

ORAL COMMUNICATION IS DIFFERENT FROM VISUAL SUPPORTED COMMUNICATION

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WED Preliminary results

• NAVIGATION DESIGN PRINCIPLES

• PAGE ORGANISATION

• READING STRATEGY

• LABELS

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Munch web site 1/3

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For the exhibition of Munch’s prints in Berlin (Staatliche Museen) in Spring 2003

Within the HELP project partially funded by the European Commission

Optimised for visually impaired users

Munch web site 2/3

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The page schema (regularly repeated in the whole site)

Munch web site 3/3An example of advanced feature

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“The first impression of the site is very positive. The pages are clearly structured. All the links have detailed titles which allow an informative and nice internet session.”

“With JAWS I needed about 1,5 minutes to get a general overview for all further action. This seems to me an acceptable time.”

First feedbacks

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• Development of systematic/empirical evaluation methodologies, in order to assess more precisely the acceptability of application for blind users.

• Definition of guidelines for difficult problems, such as dealing with long lists of items or dealing with text referring to visual experiences.      

Future work/1

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• Improving the effectiveness of navigational patterns for blind users, who can never look at the screen, therefore must rely only upon oral communication.

• Development of “semi-oral” navigational patterns, for those users who in a given context (e.g. walking in an archeological park or a museum) would rather listen to the application, but may occasionally look at a (small) screen.

Future work/2

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Would you like to know more?Would you like to help us in our research?

• diblas@elet.polimi.it• speronim@lu.unisi.ch

www.munchundberlin.org

Contacts