Social Accessibility Project
In a recent IBM press release titled IBM software enhances Web accessibility for the blind the company launched a new application that seeks to harness the power and time of Internet users around the globe to make the Web more accessible to people with vision impairment. This idea came from the personal experience of an IBM researcher, Chieko Asakawa, who is blind herself and often encountered inaccessible Web sites.
"Many blind or partially sighted users run screen reading software that describes the content of a Web page but often encounter problems. The screen readers rely on text or descriptive tags to explain the items on a page but these are often added as an after thought or are incomplete."
"Using the new IBM software users can report these problems to a central database and ask for additional descriptive text to be added to a site. Other Internet users that want to contribute can then check the database, select one of the submitted problems and 'start fixing it' by added text labels. The additional information isn't incorporated into the original site's HTML code but into a metadata file that is loaded each time a user with vision impairment subsequently visits the site."
The Social Accessibility Project Beta site is available as a pilot service and focuses on users of screen readers. The system consists of tools and a server that enables the collaborative authoring. The entire process is empowered by various collaboration services, such as comments, discussions, measurements, and incentives and consists of three parts:
- components for screen reader users
- a browser extension for volunteers
- a server that supports all the collaboration services
An important characteristic of the tools for both the supporters and screen reader users is that they use seamless interfaces with exisiting browsing environments. Users can also create metadata: When a user finds an important position in a page, the position can be submitted as a "landmark" for other screen reader users.
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