Semantically enhanced browsing for blind people in the WWW

The WWW is today the biggest source of information and an essential tool for many activities of daily life. Unfortunately, information seeking in this complex hypermedia environment is generally not an easy task. The potentially complex task of information seeking in the WWW is further complicated when the end-user is blind or visually impaired (VI). Usually, web pages are created without taken accessibility into account and without using HTML markup correctly to express the functional structure of documents. Both facts pose a lot of problems to VI during information seeking in the web. In this paper we discuss problems related to this issue and how the information seeking process in the WWW could become more effective and efficient for the VI. We also present an ongoing research effort, inspired from the idea of Semantic Web, aiming to enhance browsing efficiency as a result of rationalizing the way VI browse the WWW.