Mobile devices have already been widely used to access the Web. However, because most available web pages are designed for desktop PC in mind, it is inconvenient to browse these large web pages on a mobile device with a small screen. In this paper, we propose a new browsing convention to facilitate navigation and reading on a small-form-factor device. A web page is organized into a two level hierarchy with a thumbnail representation at the top level for providing a global view and index to a set of subpages at the bottom level for detail information. A page adaptation technique is also developed to analyze the structure of an existing web page and split it into small and logically related units that fit into the screen of a mobile device. For a web page not suitable for splitting, auto-positioning or scrolling-by-block is used to assist the browsing as an alterative. Our experimental results show that our proposed browsing convention and developed page adaptation scheme greatly improve the user’s browsing experiences on a device with a small display.

Web sites are designed for graphical mode of interaction. Sighted users can “cut to the chase ” and quickly identify relevant information in Web pages. On the contrary, individuals with visual disabilities have to use screen-readers to browse the Web. As screen-readers process pages sequentially and read through everything, Web browsing can become strenuous and time-consuming. Although, the use of shortcuts and searching offers some improvements, the problem still remains. In this paper, we address the problem of information overload in non-visual Web access using the notion of context. Our prototype system, CSurf, embodying our approach, provides the usual features of a screen-reader. However, when a user follows a link, CSurf captures the context of the link using a simple topic-boundary detection technique, and uses it to identify relevant information on the next page with the help of a Support Vector Machine, a statistical machine-learning model. Then, CSurf reads the Web page starting from the most relevant section, identified by the model. We conducted a series experiments to evaluate the performance of CSurf against the state-of-the-art screen-reader, JAWS. Our results show that the use of context can potentially save browsing time and substantially improve browsing experience of visually disabled people.

Movement, or mobility, is key to the accessibility, design, and usability of many hypermedia resources (websites); and key to good mobility is context and preview by probing. This is especially the case for visually impaired users when a hypertext anchor is inaccurately described or is described out of context. This means confusion and disorientation. Mobility is similarly reduced when the link target of the anchor has no relationship to the expected information present on the hypertext node (web-page). We suggest that confident movement with purpose, ease, and accuracy can only be achieved when complete contextual information and an accurate description of the proposed destination (preview) are available. Our past work (1) deriving mobility heuristics from mobility models, (2) transforming web-pages based on these heuristics, and (3) building tools to analyse and access these transformed pages; has shown us that a tool to expand context and preview would be useful. In this paper we describe the development of such a middleware tool to automatically and dynamically annotate web-pages with additional context information present within the page, and preview information present within hypertext link destinations found on the page.

The importance of middleware and content adaptation has previously been demonstrated for pervasive use of Web-based applications. In this paper we propose a modular, extensible, and scalable middleware component called the Content Adaptation Pipeline that performs content adaptation on arbitrarily complex data types not limited to text and graphic images. Furthermore, the architecture can be used as part of many client-server applications, not just Web browsers. In our work we leverage the XML language as a uniform means to describe all the elements in our architecture, including the client device and user profiles, the data characteristics, the transcoding operations performed on the data, and the resultant adapted data. We illustrate the flexibility of our architecture to support new data types and adaptation operations by first showing its use with data from a real-world medical application and then extending its capabilities to handle animated graphics and also real-time streaming RTP data. Finally, we demonstrate scalability in our architecture by executing the Content Adaptation Pipeline over a distributed set of servers running an efficient protocol.

Travelling upon the Web is difficult for visually impaired users since the Web pages are designed for visual interaction [6]. Visually impaired users usually use screen readers 1 to access the Web in audio. However, unlike sighted users, screen readers cannot see the implicit structural and navigational knowledge encoded within the visual presentation of Web pages. Therefore, in a visually impaired user’s environment, objects that support travel are missing or inaccessible. Our approach to remedy this is to annotate pages with an ontology, the Travel Ontology, that aims to encapsulate rich structural and navigational knowledge about these objects. We use Semantic Web technologies to make such knowledge explicit and computationally accessible. Our semi-automated tool, Dante identifies travel objects on Web pages, annotates them appropriately with the Travel Ontology and uses this to transform the pages to enhance the travel support. Thus Dante uses the Travel Ontology to enhance the travel experience of visually impaired users. This paper introduces the Travel Ontology, the annotation pipeline used in the annotation part of Dante and some transformation scenarios to illustrate how the annotations are used to guide the transformation of Web pages. 2

Abstract. Visually impaired users are hindered in their efforts to access the largest repository of electronic information in the world – the World Wide Web (Web). The web is visually-centric with regard to presentation and information order / layout, this can (and does) hinder users who need presentation-agnostic access to information. Transcoding can help to make information more accessible via a restructuring of pages. We describe an approach based on annotation of web pages, encoding semantic information that can then be used by tools in order to manipulate and present web pages in a form that provides easier access to content. Annotations are made directly to style sheet information, allowing the annotation of large numbers of similar pages with little effort. 1

A high quality of free movement, or mobility, is key to the accessibility, design, and usability of many `common-use' hypermedia resources (Web sites) and key to good mobility is context and preview. This is especially the case when a hypertext anchor is inaccurately described or is described out of context as confusion and disorientation can ensue. Mobility is similarly reduced when the link target of the anchor has no relationship to the expected information present on the hypertext node (Web page). Confident movement with purpose, ease, and accuracy can only be achieved when complete contextual information and an accurate description of the proposed destination (preview) are available. We suggest that sighted people can benefit from additional context and preview information included in hyperlinks and disprove the empirical evidence that suggests these users do not benefit from link descriptions which have this enhanced information. We briefly describe a middleware system to automatically expand context and preview in link descriptions thereby `fixing' terse links, links out of context, and inaccurate or inadequate preview information. Finally, we conduct a formative evaluation which shows us that a system to expand context and preview would be useful in different ways depending on the type of link.

We have previously shown that the mobility, or ease of travel, of visually impaired Web users is reduced since most Web pages are usually designed for visual interaction[7]. Therefore, in a visually impaired person's environment objects that support travel are missing or inaccessible altogether. We aim to enhance the experience of visually impaired Web travellers by using annotation and Semantic Web technologies. In [17], we have proposed a semi-automated tool which encodes techniques for the support of travel upon the Web. The main goal of this tool is to analyse Web pages to identify objects that support mobility and travel, discover their roles, annotate them and transform pages based on these annotations to enhance the provided mobility support. This paper mainly presents the annotation part of the tool and provides some transformation examples which are based on the annotations. The main message of this paper is that visually impaired Web users could also benefit from the Semantic Web technologies and here we demonstrate a possible approach to achieve that.

Abstract: We present a taxonomy of task by information structure for voice interfaces to web pages in an analogous effort to Shneiderman’s taxonomy for information visualization. Our goal is to develop guidelines for the development of voice navigation of web spaces not as a replacement for visual web browsing, but instead to support focused information seeking tasks such as known-item search and directed browsing. We describe highlevel user tasks (Situate, Navigate, Query, and Details) and information structures (regions, menu/lists, text areas, repeated/structured information) that comprise the axes of our taxonomy and show how voice interfaces can support these tasks and structures.

Display characteristics, network Quality of Service, and the user's current task all exhibit a wide range of variation when users interact with mobile and ubiquitous devices. It is desirable to enable applications to adapt to these variations. The user's experience in interacting with the application can be significantly enhanced by adapting the data presented. However, we find that naive degradation of data can quickly result in an unacceptable presentation.