Transcript Document

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)
The WEB is essentially VISUAL
• Large amount of information in one page
• Kind of content recognizable by colour, position, size
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Implications for Visually impaired people
They navigate content through a screen-reader
When Web pages are “read”:
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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!
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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)
A joint initiative of the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and the
University of Lugano (Switzerland)
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
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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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Munch web site 2/3
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
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Munch web site 3/3
An example of advanced feature
The page schema (regularly repeated in the whole site)
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First feedbacks
“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.”
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Future work/1
• 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.
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Future work/2
• 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.
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Contacts
Would you like to know more?
Would you like to help us in our research?
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
www.munchundberlin.org
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