The 'Dante' project is looking at how visually impaired people access Hypermedia environments, of which Web is the most popular example. The main goal is to devise a tool that uses a model-driven approach to analyse and transform Web pages to increase mobility in virtual environment.
Sreen readers, unlike sighted users, cannot see the implicit structural and mobility knowledge encoded within the visual presentation of Web pages. We use Semantic Web technologies to make this knowledge explicit and accessible to screen readers. In this context, Semantic Web technologies are not used to convey content (what a Web page is about or for) but to convey the structural and mobility properties of Web pages.
The mobility, or ease of travel, of visually impaired Web users is reduced since most Web pages are usually designed for visual interaction. Therefore, in a visually impaired person's environment objects that support travel are missing or inaccessible altogether. Our goal is to enhance the travel experience of visually impaired Web travellers by annotating pages with the Web Authoring for Accessibility (WAfA) ontology that aims to encapsulate rich structural and navigational knowledge about these objects. We propose a semi-automated tool, Dante, which encodes techniques for the support of travel upon the Web. The main goal of Dante, as illustrated below, is to (1) analyse Web pages to identify objects that support mobility and travel; (2) discover their roles; (3) annotate them with the WAfA ontology in order to make their roles explicit and (4) transform pages based on the annotations to enhance the provided mobility support.
Related projects to Dante can be found at the Human Centred Web research page (HCW).
