Enriching web information scent for blind users

Link annotation with the accessibility level of the target Web page is an adaptive navigation support technique aimed at increasing blind users' orientation in Web sites. In this work, the accessibility level of a page is measured by exploiting data from evaluation reports produced by two automatic assessment tools. These tools support evaluation of accessibility and usability guideline-sets. As a result, links are annotated with a score that indicates the conformance of the target Web page to blind user accessibility and usability guidelines. A user test with 16 users was conducted in order to observe the strategies they followed when links were annotated with these scores. With annotated links, the navigation paradigm changed from sequential to browsing randomly through the subset of those links with high scores. Even if there was not a general agreement on the correspondence between scores and user perception of accessibility, users found annotations helpful when browsing through links related to a given topic.

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