Purely vision-based segmentation of web pages for assistive technology

We use a novel vision-based method to analyze the layout of a web page.Our method produces a hierarchical segmentation of the page reflecting its structure.Vision-based methods are not sensitive to implementation language or complexity.The visual presentation of a page provides rich information about semantic structure.This structure can help create modified presentations for users with assistive needs. We propose a system for analyzing the structure of a web page based on purely visual information, rather than on implementation details. This is advantageous because regardless of the complexity of the underlying implementation, the web page is designed to be easily interpreted visually. Our method produces a hierarchical segmentation reflecting the visual structure of the rendered page. This rich information about the presentation of the web page can be used by other systems which produce alternate presentations more suitable for users with visual or cognitive disabilities.

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