Weekly Blog 11/9/2011 in Last Week's Blog, I Began the Introduction Into Existing Assistive Technology Software; for This Week

Weekly Blog 11/9/2011

In last week’s blog, I began the introduction into existing assistive technology software; for this week, I had the chance to research and test some of the existing software for Web Accessibility. For many older individuals and people with disabilities, the accessibility to Web content can be difficult with standard web browsers. There are many open source web browsers which include Konqueror , Communicate: Webwide , and WebbIE that specialize in web accessibility tools for people with disabilities. In the screenshot below we compare the standard Internet Explorer with WebbIE to see the difference in the displaying of content:

Internet Explorer content displayed (Figure 1)

Notice the difference b/t the buttons

Also take into consideration of the content displayed

WebbIE (Figure 2)

Above shown are two screenshots of Internet Explorer (IE) and the WebbIE browsers. In this case, WebbIE was specifically designed for people with visual impairments. Notice the differences of the layout, menus, buttons, and content. In Figure 1, the IE menu buttons are small and low contrast; also take note of the content. While this content may seem appealing to the general public, people with visual impairments will experiencing difficulty viewing the text and content. In Figure 2, the buttons are large with high contrast and the web content only shows text.

In addition, the Mozilla Firefox web browser also supports numerous add-ons for web accessibility. In Spring Semester 2011, I participated in Dr. Coppola’s Intergenerational Computing Course; in the course, I taught residents at United Hebrew the basics of computing and browsing the internet. During the course, the class used 2 different web browsers, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. In my observations, I found that the older residents were more capable of handling Firefox than IE. Fortunately, Mozilla’s open source web browser, Firefox has allowed developers worldwide to develop extensions and add-ons to increase the functionality of the browser. For web accessibility, multiple extensions can be downloaded. Below this line is shown a screenshot, one showing the accessible add-ons and web accessibility tools available to download and one showing a working web accessible add-on:

In this screenshot, notice the different colored tabs. In Mozilla Firefox, users can use multiple tabs to view different web pages simultaneously; in this case, the color tabs allow older individuals and people with disabilities to differentiate and have better organization of their web content.

The screenshots displaying the many tools and features only show some of the tools available. During ATC_Online’s development, we will create a separate webpage dedicated to providing users access to web accessibility resources and tools. In next week’s blog, we will take an introductory look in assistive technologies within the Windows and Ubuntu operating systems. Stay tune.