Web 2.0 Vision for the Blind
Robert Baumgartner
Lixto Software GmbH
Vienna, Austria
baumgartner@lixto.com
RuslanR. Fayzrakhmanov
Wolfgang Holzinger
Bernhard Kru¨pl
Max C. Go¨bel
David Klein
Inst. of Information Systems
University of Technology
Vienna, Austria
abba@dbai.tuwien.ac.at
Rafael Gattringer
Faculty of Psychology
University of Vienna
Austria
ABSTRACT
In today's world, access to the Web has turned into a basic
need. The Web eases daily life signicantly and has turned
into an essential - and in some scenarios even exclusive -
channel for information, communication and transactions.
However, the Web does not simplify life for everyone. To
guarantee the benet of the Web for the entire human pop-
ulation, the needs of user groups with special requirements
such as blind users are of supreme importance. Recently,
especially with the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, new bar-
riers have been created.
We believe, the only solution is that a blind person con-
suming the Web is put back in full charge of how to consume
it. In the ABBA (Advanced Barrier-free Browser Accessibil-
ity) project described in this paper, on the one hand we cre-
ate empirical eld-studies where we investigate the problems
blind users face in the Web, and on the other hand a method-
ology and system that provides them with the kind of help
a sighted assistant would give. To create such a methodol-
ogy, understanding of how blind users perceive Web pages
is essential and re
ected by creating mental models. Based
on these models, strategies for dierent axes of navigating a
Web page are devised.
Keywords
accessibility, blind, navigation, screen reader
1. INTRODUCTION
For the blind the Internet is still a valley of \blood, sweat
and tears", as one of our interview partners describes it.
This leads to a feeling of frustration and total exclusion as
a potential target group. Yet the advantages of the Net
outweigh the induced frequent frustration.
Worldwide knowledge and communication are the main
driving forces for enduring the challenges of the Web. Its
emergence was in fact a revolution for the blind, perhaps
even more important than for sighted people. Available doc-
uments for example do not have to be translated any more
to Braille but can be directly accessed via the Net. Podcasts
give a great example of auditory content.
Copyright is held by the authors.
Web Science Conf. 2010, April 26-27, 2010, Raleigh, NC, USA.
.
Following factors in
uence the blind Web surng experi-
ence: the structural quality of the Web page, the skill level
and motivation of the Web designer, the knowledge of the
user and the type of the screen reader.a
Blind users perceive a web page as a stream of single
HTML tags
owing by. On the other hand a very broad
view of a document is given to sighted users by visual ele-
ments. Not only the objects themselves are presented, but
also dierent colours and shapes with their relevance to the
psychological based gestalt laws. As thereby much more in-
formation is processed at once, the visual channel can be
compared to a broadband connection. This latter access
channel enables a much quicker exploration of new web sites.
When blind users exactly know the document structure of a
web site, they are able to navigate even faster than sighted
users. For blind users any visual information is lost from
the visual driven Web. This results in a completely dier-
ent user experience.
As technologies shift and new ones emerge, blind users
have to constantly adapt their access strategies. When search
engines became the dominant portal for accessing the Web,
this had a major impact on the quality of the blind user ex-
perience. Nowadays competing web sites are forced to opti-
mise their HTML code and site structure to achieve a higher
search ranking. In a certain way a search engine crawler ex-
tracts similar information like a typical blind user. Both
have to strongly rely on HTML markup tags to get an idea
of the content of the page in an acceptable time.
On the other hand, many of the developments of the
so called Web 2.0 revolution have left the blind commu-
nity in the cold. When the Web experience became more
community-oriented and content creation more decentralised
for the average netizen, the sometimes awkward and ad-
hoc realisations based around purely visual paradigms |
asynchronous in execution and shrouding content by pro-
gramming languages | proved to be a formidable obstacle
for screen reading software and therefore also for the blind
user. As more and more content moves into these networks,
and the blind users stay locked out, the quality of their Web
experience decreases.
More recently, the tide seems to turn again. Eorts to
incubate a Semantic Web, originally intended to help ma-
chines grasp a glimpse of comprehension of the content they
are processing, might in fact turn out to be a direct prot
for the blind community and accessibility technology.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Sec-
1

tion 2 continues presenting a broader overview of our ex-
periences and communications with people form the blind
community, and the lessons we were able to draw from it.
Section 3 introduces the abstract conceptual model of our
approach, the mental model and its connection to Psychol-
ogy's gestalt theory. Section 4 presents a more concrete,
formal and implementation{oriented approach to the guide-
lines laid out in Section 3 and introduces the Multi-axial
navigation model. Section 5 is committed to list related
work and describes the context of our ideas. Finally, Sec-
tion 6 concludes the paper and give a further outlook on our
future plans.
2. BRIDGING THE GAP TO THE BLIND
WORLD
Questions arise when starting the research into the blind
world. Do we know if our concepts about blind people are
correct? Where have our assumptions originated? How
should we communicate to avoid unintended insulting re-
marks?
We noticed that creating new technology for helping the
so called \disabled" lead to a position of unaware superior-
ity. This attitude creates an intention of knowing what is
useful and practical for blind people, however not involving
them in the development. The mentioned \disabled" view
might mislead promising research. In our opinion society
forms an environment that either \enables" or \disables"
its stakeholders. Just imagine for a moment that a vast ma-
jority of the people in the global village were blind. In this
scenario we might have mostly advanced (auditive and ki-
naesthetic) screen readers today instead of highly visually
reliant web browsers, resulting in enabled blind people and
disabled seeing people.
Therefore we suggest that it is indispensable to start any
research from scratch and questioning previous mental con-
cepts. Usability studies can create an insightful understand-
ing for the blind experience.
An interview partner pointed out that the perception of
blind people was not worse, just dierent. We would perhaps
call it \shifted perception".
Research methodology. As mentioned, attaining a
clear understanding about the blind mental experience seems
important. Therefore combined qualitative interviews with
usability studies were used to observe and explore this dif-
ferent web user experience. Thinking aloud is a very helpful
technique to retrace the perception of the blind users. A
questionnaire regarding the usage of the Web was set up
as well. The results of both qualitative and quantitative
research techniques however have to be taken into account
only very carefully, as the sample size of the probands in
both approaches is rather small.
2.1 User behaviour
There are two ways of approaching accessibility for blind
users: text-to-speech (TTS) systems and Braille displays.
These methods are not competing, in fact they could be
seen as complementary. The advantage of this combination
is that dierent interpretations of data which provide more
specic information to the user. While TTS works well to
cover the presentation of occurring events such as pop ups
or important notications and therefore is often used in this
context, the unbeaten benet of Braille is to present more
complex contents such as tables, mathematic formulas or
similar contents.
Confronted with navigation uncertainty, blind users have
a preference for safe havens, consistency and a minimisation
of risky navigation choices. One indication for the prefer-
ence for safe havens might be the strong use of email. The
email format symbolises a simple navigation interface and a
stripped down layout of the documents. Web forums are re-
placed by classic mailing lists, conrmations of online bank-
ing are sent as email and news might be preferred to be read
as mail as well.
Concrete user patterns were especially interesting to ob-
serve. Wikipedia for instance is a very frequently visited
site of the blind community. The site structure is stable and
makes good use of accessibility standards. Wikipedia is of-
ten even preferred over common search engines as a primary
information source.
2.2 Shortcomings in today’s approaches
Screen-readers. The biggest shortcoming of contem-
porary screen reading software is, in our opinion, its lack
of deeper understanding of the large{scale structure of a
document.
Existing software, with its roots in general accessibility for
graphical user interfaces, treats semi{structured documents
as mostly annotated text. It leverages on the presence of
obvious markups, like hyperlinks and headings, but makes
no further eort in understanding the basic structure of a
document. In a way, it is missing the bigger picture while
presenting the tiny details.
The problem with this approach is that the user is often
overwhelmed with an avalanche of mind{numbing detail, be-
cause the system is incapable of distinguishing content from
control elements or pure decoration.
Current software more or less strips a Web document of
all non{text elements it does not understand and presents
the remaining text content.
Further, general drawbacks of some screen-readers are a
high purchase price, indirect costs through the forced pur-
chase of an operating system and nally closed source. Es-
pecially, free and open source software would be helpful in
his area to exchange ideas and enable the blind and seeing
community to contribute.
ARIA Roles. The WAI{ARIA [9] initiative addresses
most of these problems by proposing a framework of an-
notations to be put alongside the Web document. These
annotations describe the "role" that certain elements of a
Web page have with a well{dened vocabulary.
We see two main problems with this approach: (a) inclu-
sion of ARIA markup depends solely on the content creator,
who is often too uniformed, works under time constraints or
is too under{budgeted to care; and (b) this is still a local
approach that, while describing the purpose of single ele-
ments in a much more satisfactory way, does not help the
user with all around navigation and familiarisation of the
page structure. Today, such guidelines are at best applied
in governmental sites.
3. BUILDING MENTAL MODELS
Much information is currently inaccessible for blind users,
because it is only visually available. It is quite common for
web site creators to think in visual terms when they design
Web pages, and often they start from visual designs and use
2