Towards the creation of accessibility agents for non-visual navigation of the web

In this paper, we highlight the main research directions currently pursued by the investigators for the development of new tools to improve Web accessibility for users with visual disabilities. The overall principle is to create intelligent software agents used to assist visually impaired individuals in accessing complex on-line data organizations (e.g., tables, frame structures) in a meaningful way. Accessibility agents make use of knowledge representation structures (automatically or manually derived) to assist users in developing navigation plans; these are employed to locate given pieces of information or to answer user's desired goals.