Jeffrey P. Bigham

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WebAnywhere A Screen Reader On-the-Go
Jeffrey P. Bigham Advised by Richard E.
Ladner Work with Craig M. Prince, Anna C.
Cavender, and Jeremy T. Brudvik University of
Washington Computer Science Engineering
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Web 2.0 Challenge and Promise

• Web 2.0 Poses Accessibility Challenges
• Dynamic Changes
• Inaccessible Interfaces
• But Web 2.0 can improve accessibility
• Use to help understand accessibility
• Use to overcome accessibility challenges

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Gmail
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Google Finance
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Menu No Style

• Inefficient to Access

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Outline

• Background
• Blind and Sighted Browsing Comparison
• Motivation for a New Screen Reader
• WebAnywhere

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WebinSitu
Browsing Behavior

• Accessibility from user perspective
• Used own equipment
• Period of one week
• 10 blind/sighted
• 21,244 pages

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User Study System
Browsing Behavior

• Based on UsaProxy1
• Similar to Google Analytics2

1 Richard Atterer et al. Knowing the User's
Every Move - User Activity Tracking for
Website Usability Evaluation and Implicit
Interaction. WWW 2007. 2 www.google.com/analyti
cs
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Efficiency
Browsing Behavior

• 2x time for blind users
• Google Task
• Entering Query
• 74.6 vs. 34.5 seconds
• Selecting Result
• 155.1 vs. 34.8 seconds

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Effects of Content
Browsing Behavior

• Blind vs. Sighted
• Images lacking alt. text 3x less likely
• 20x fewer interactions with dynamic content
• 7x fewer visits to pages using AJAX
• No Difference with Flash
• About half were ads
• Many played sound
• Few vital

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Outline

• Background
• Blind and Sighted Browsing Comparison
• Motivation for a Screen Reading Web Application
• WebAnywhere

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Advantages of Web 2.0 Apps
Motivation

• Advantages
• Ubiquitous Access
• Lightweight Client UI
• Server-Side Components
• Disadvantages
• User Experience
• Blind Users May Miss Out
• Accessibility Problems
• Require 1000 Screen Reader

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The Blind Population
Motivation

• 10 million visually-impaired people in the U.S.
• 1.3 million blind people in U.S.

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Surfing sans your computer
Motivation

• Checking email at the gym
• Making restaurant reservations
• Checking when the bus is coming
• Settle an argument
• Seeing who won the game
• ...and many more

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Mobile Access
Motivation

• Many Options
• Public Terminals with Screen Reader
• Smartphones with Screen Reader
• PDAs
• Phones
• Many Tradeoffs
• Cost
• Availability
• Functionality

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349
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Motivation
High Availability
High Cost
Low Cost
Low Availability
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Free Alternatives
Motivation
GOOG-411
National Association for the Blind, India
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Enabling Access
Motivation

• Barriers to Ubiquitous Access
• Screen reader required on each machine
• Screen readers are expensive ()
• Mobile Devices are even more expensive
• Why are screen readers expensive?
• Small market
• Customized for each application
• Interaction
• Accessibility API

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The Worlds Blind Population
Motivation

• Vast majority cant afford screen readers
• Less than 1 of blind people have one
• 1 out of 3 blind people live in India1
• Accessing the web
• 375.00 Computer
• 1000.00 Screen Reader

1 National Association for the Blind, India
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Screen-Reading Web Application
Motivation

• Web Application
• One API to support
• Affordable
• Almost Free
• Accessible from
• Any Operating System and Browser
• Anywhere (with a computer that can play sound)
• Several Groups Benefit
• Blind users on-the-go
• Blind users otherwise unable to afford screen
  reader
• Web developers wanting to check accessibility

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Outline

• Background
• Blind and Sighted Browsing Comparison
• Motivation for a Screen Reading Web Application
• WebAnywhere

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WebAnywhere
WebAnywhere

• Web Application
• Local Interface
• Remote Speech
• Local Speech Playback

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http//webinsight.cs.washington.edu/wapages/www.go
ogle.com
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WebAnywhere Architecture
WebAnywhere
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Speech Generation Playback
WebAnywhere

• Speech Produced Server-Side
• Freeware Festival TTS1
• Sent as MP3s
• Cache of Speech Sounds
• Playback
• Flash via SoundManager 22
• Embedded Players, Java

Link WebInSight
1 http//www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ 2
http//www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager
2/
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Sound Length
WebAnywhere

• Generate sound for each DOM node
• Simple Playback
• Balances Latency/Natural Speech
• Most sounds lt 10k, 2-5 seconds
• Caching Performance
• lth1gtWebInSightlt/h1gt ?
• Heading 1 WebInSight
• ltimg srcweb_eye.png altWebInSightgt ?
• Image WebInSightgt
• lta hrefwww.google.comgtGooglelt/agt ?
• Link Google

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Prefetching
WebAnywhere

• AJAX Requests
• Prime the Cache
• All DOM elements
• Does it work?
• Latency 200ms 800ms on average
• Prefetching Improves 20
• Opportunity for Smarter Prefetching

msn.com
yahoo.com
google.com
weather.com
washington.edu
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Remaining Issues
WebAnywhere

• Losing Focus
• Pop-ups aggressively blocked
• Redirection aggressively blocked
• Keyboard Restrictions
• No control keys that would remove focus
• Cant block all such keys
• Security
• Avoiding cross-site scripting isnt always good

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Remaining Issues (2)
WebAnywhere

• Getting to WebAnywhere in the first place

• Friendly Librarian
• Builtin OS Functionality
• Other Help

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Preliminary User Study
WebAnywhere

• 3 blind web users (1 female, 2 remote)
• Tasks
• Google search and unstructured browsing
• Occasionally lost focus
• Able to get back
• Comments
• No feedback about latency
• More features
• Wanted Ability to Customize to Preference

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Future Work
WebAnywhere

• Implement more features!
• Make more robust
• Improve protections against losing focus
• Secure Sites
• Enable access to secure sites
• At least maintain browser protections
• Release

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Conclusion

• Screen reader users limited
• Cost, availability of assistive technology
• Web 2.0 A challenge and opportunity
• WebAnywhere
• A screen reading web application
• Low-cost alternative to screen readers

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WebInSight http//webinsight.cs.washington.edu
Thanks to National Science Foundation Grant
(IIS-0415273) Scott Rose, Steve Gribble, Richard
Atterer, and Jacob Wobbrock.