WebNexter: dynamic guided tours for screen readers

Abstract

Recent research has shown that screen-reader users can find information on a website almost twice as fast if they bypass indexes and just navigate the content pages of a collection linearly (in a guided-tour fashion). Yet manually building a guided tour for each existing index requires significant resources from web developers, especially for very large web applications. To address this problem, we introduce WebNexter, a web browser extension that automatically generates guided tours from the indexes present in the page a screen-reader user is currently visiting. WebNexter is manifest in a Google Chrome extension that implements screen-reader accessible, dynamic construction of guided tours from a very large, eCommerce website prototype. Our goal is to develop WebNexter extensions for multiple browsers that will work on any website; this will relieve developers from the burden of designing guided tours while greatly accelerating the screen-reader navigation experience during fact-finding.