Considering web accessibility in information retrieval systems

Abstract

Search engines are the most common gateway for information searching in the WWW. Since Information Retrieval systems do not take web accessibility into account, results displayed are not useful for users with disabilities. We present a framework that includes the requirements to overcome this situation. It is composed of three modules: Content Analysis Module, Accessibility Analysis Module and Results Collector Module. This framework facilitates the implementation of search engines which return results ranked according to accessibility level as well as content relevance. Since criteria to sort results by their accessibility are necessary, we define accurate quantitative accessibility metrics which can be automatically calculated exploiting results yielded by any automatic evaluation tool. A prototype based on these requirements has been implemented to show the validity of the proposal. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.