Enabling Accessibility of Content Updates in Web Applications

This Phase I SBIR project will investigate the feasibility of making dynamic web content accessible to people with vision impairments with an ease that will be on par with sighted people. Such content characterizes todays myriad of important and pervasive web applications (e.g., Facebook, Gmail, Google Docs, Chat Rooms, Online Banking, and Travel) The project will demonstrate the feasibility by building a prototype assistive web browsing application that will be intelligent enough to locate web content updates, identify their type and priority (importance), notify the user of the updates according to the priority, and provide usable and efficient interfaces for reviewing the updates, as well as interacting with standard widgets (e.g., chats and calendars). Controlled experiments will be conducted to evaluate the proposed approach and interfaces. The application will be accessible to people who are blind and need screen-reader access, as well as to those who have low vision and use magnifiers. The proposed technology development will embody the vision of universal web access; it will enable visually-impaired people to use the aforementioned web applications as sighted people do, and interact with these applications as effectively and efficiently as is possible with text-to-speech and screen magnification tools.