Readable image for the visually impaired

Abstract

A picture is worth a thousand words is a well know adage and refers to the fact that any complex word description can be conveyed easily and quickly with a still image. The use of images, pictures and block diagrams to describe something is often used without a second thought. The use of images in any form becomes an accessibility issue for the visually impaired. With the concept of a document and the hyper text markup language (HTML) page blurring, W3C has come up with measures to make the images accessible on the web. The most recent being the use of alt attribute, which is designed to be an alternative text description for images on web pages and longdesc attribute which is a mechanism to give greater details of the image. In this paper, we propose an approach which enables accessibility of images. This paper has two parts, the first part describes a mechanism to build a multi level description of an image to enable accessibility or readability while the second part describes an user interface that enables navigation of the multi level description by hovering on the image. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.