Augmenting Websites with Voice Commands: An Approach Focused on Accessibility

Abstract

Even now, users with disabilities encounter serious barriers when accessing the Web. In particular, blind and visually impaired users encounter difficulties browsing and reading the contents of a website. Screen readers provide some assistance, yet, as they are unable to interpret the Web structure, they summarise information and read specific labelled fragments. Therefore, the overall comprehension of the text remains challenging. In this sense, in order to improve the accessibility of websites on the fly, we propose a Web augmentation framework for accessibility (WAFRA). Our framework uses Web augmentation techniques that extend the website with voice interaction and new actions: label text fragments, read aloud these fragments, facilitate navigation, increase font size and show videos. In order to perform this accessibility improvement, we automatically provide annotations from DBPedia regarding important information for end users. Moreover, we also provide the option that intermediary users add new annotations for labelling or including more specific information, which can be shared with other users by crowdsourcing. The evaluation of the framework shows its usefulness to ease website access for users with visual disabilities compared to using screen readers.