SIGACCESS

IBM Japan, Yamato-shi, Kanagawa-ken, Japan

The Web has become a new information resource for the blind. However, Web accessibility is becoming worse, since page authors tend to care only for the visual appearance. We have developed an Accessibility Transcoding System to solve this problem. This system has the ability to transcode complete pages on annotated sites into totally accessible pages without changing the original pages. However, site-wide annotation authoring is an extremely tedious and time-consuming task. This prevented us from applying our transcoding system to a wide variety of sites. In order to overcome this difficulty, we developed a new algorithm, “Dynamic Annotation Matching”. By utilizing this algorithm, our transcoding system can automatically determine appropriate annotations based on each page’s layout. We also developed a site-wide annotation-authoring tool, “Site Pattern Analyzer”. We evaluated the feasibility of creating site-wide annotations by using the algorithm and the tool, and report on our success here.