Study on web accessibility to help develop assistive technology for visually challenged people

Abstract

The goal is to study accessibility of web pages, specially those who have visual disabilities and finds it difficult to perceive, navigate and interact with the web. Most websites have some sort of accessibility barrier that makes it difficult for a person with a disability to use their site.Accessibility of web pages continues to remain a major challenge globally for both accessibility based web developers and researchers.Screen Readers do exist that allow blind people to hear what is sighted on a page. Still its of no use, if vast majority of web pages on Internet are inaccessible and if developers continue to build pages without keeping accessibility front in their mind.Effective classification of web pages as assistive and non-assistive pages can help improve the association of web elements with their accessibility guidelines and rules. Further using the syntactic structure used for performing the classification, it might be able to convert inaccessible web pages to better accessible pages. Further using the classification and similarity based model, we can avoid the limitation of the rule based model.A web chrome extension is developed for filling up the forms, only for the web pages which follow accessibility rules. The extension provides fully voice based speech generation and recognition and thus not require us to interact with web pages using mouse or keyboard.