BROWSERLESS WEB AUTOMATION FOR BLIND USERS

Abstract

Navigating and performing different tasks on the Web can be frustrating for blind users. This is related to different aspects including a linear nature of navigation through the content, the issues of contemporary web pages not following accessibility guidelines, and limitations of assistive technologies trying to keep pace with a constantly changing web stack of technologies. Web automation tools help users to automate tasks and ease the navigation to a desired content. However, most of existing approaches are based on the web browser and, therefore, have some requirements on the hardware and software used, its performance. Furthermore, they have to take into account complex sequences of DOM events which reflect different changes and states on a web page, such as completion of the content loading or reaction on user actions. These non-trivial conglomerates of events often considerably reduce the robustness of web automation. In this paper we introduce a new approach, FastWrap4A, which can analyse user interactions and transpose the automation from the UI level directly to the level of data-focused interactions with web servers. This approach does not require a browser or an integrated web page rendering engine and can be executed on different devices.