Web Accessibility for the Blind Through Visual Representation Analysis
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Die approbierte Originalversion dieser Dissertation ist in der Hauptbibliothek der Technischen Universität Wien aufgestellt und zugänglich. http://www.ub.tuwien.ac.at The approved original version of this thesis is available at the main library of the Vienna University of Technology. http://www.ub.tuwien.ac.at/eng Web Accessibility for the Blind Through Visual Representation Analysis DISSERTATION zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doktor/in der technischen Wissenschaften eingereicht von Ruslan Fayzrakhmanov Matrikelnummer 0728003 an der Fakultät für Informatik der Technischen Universität Wien Betreuung: Prof. Dr. Reinhard Pichler Diese Dissertation haben begutachtet: (Prof. Dr. Reinhard Pichler) (Prof. Dr. Alessandro Provetti) Wien, 03.12.2013 (Ruslan Fayzrakhmanov) Technische Universität Wien A-1040 Wien Karlsplatz 13 Tel. +43-1-58801-0 www.tuwien.ac.at Web Accessibility for the Blind Through Visual Representation Analysis DISSERTATION submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doktor/in der technischen Wissenschaften by Ruslan Fayzrakhmanov Registration Number 0728003 to the Faculty of Informatics at the Vienna University of Technology Advisor: Prof. Dr. Reinhard Pichler The dissertation has been reviewed by: (Prof. Dr. Reinhard Pichler) (Prof. Dr. Alessandro Provetti) Wien, 03.12.2013 (Ruslan Fayzrakhmanov) Technische Universität Wien A-1040 Wien Karlsplatz 13 Tel. +43-1-58801-0 www.tuwien.ac.at Erklärung zur Verfassung der Arbeit Ruslan Fayzrakhmanov Favoritenstraße 9-11/184-2, A-1040 Wien Hiermit erkläre ich, dass ich diese Arbeit selbständig verfasst habe, dass ich die verwen- deten Quellen und Hilfsmittel vollständig angegeben habe und dass ich die Stellen der Arbeit - einschließlich Tabellen, Karten und Abbildungen -, die anderen Werken oder dem Internet im Wortlaut oder dem Sinn nach entnommen sind, auf jeden Fall unter Angabe der Quelle als Entlehnung kenntlich gemacht habe. (Ort, Datum) (Unterschrift Verfasserin) i Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of many people, who I would like to acknowledge in this section: I am very thankful to Prof. Thomas Eiter for giving me the unique opportunity to undertake my Ph.D. studies at the Vienna University of Technology. My sincere thanks to Katrin Seyr for her unceasing support and attention during my work on the thesis. I am very grateful to my advisor, Prof. Reinhard Pichler who helped me to systematize the results of my research, ameliorate presentation of the material, and who also endeavored to ensure the completion of this work. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my second advisor, Dr. Robert Baumgartner who gave me invaluable suggestions on my own scientific research and thanks to whom, I was able to attain practical experience by participating in scientific projects and conferences. I would also like to mention Prof. Georg Gottlob, who always encouraged me to pursue this creative work. I very much appreciate the scientific experience and practical knowledge which I acquired through all the productive and dynamic work alongside my inspirational colleagues and friends from the DBAI group. I am particularly grateful to Bernhard Krüpl-Sypien, Wolfgang Holzinger, and Max Christopher Göbel. It was a lot of fun to work with them. The contributions which are included and discussed within this thesis are mainly based on cooperative work with our research projects. I very much appreciate the recommendations provided by Prof. Yevgen Borodin regarding this thesis as they were extremely helpful in improving my work. Many thanks to Alexey A. Viktorov and Jürgen Schwingshandl, who helped me in conducting a survey of users who are blind and evaluating the proposed approaches. I would like to thank Stephen Longley for proofreading this thesis and ensuring its readability. Last but by no means least, I am very thankful to my wonderful, loving and understanding parents and brother who by their example, advice and continuous support inspired me in my research. This thesis has been supported by the Erasmus Mundus External Cooperation Window Programme of the European Union, by the Austrian Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft FFG under grants 819563 (ABBA project) and 829614 (TAMCROW project), and by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant P25207-N23. iii Abstract One of the most important attributes of a civilized society is based on the principle of equal op- portunities for self-development and self-actualization within one’s life. In today’s contemporary information society, this principle can be realized by enhancing the accessibility of information resources for various groups of the population. Information is an inalienable part of today’s life. This fact is clearly evident in the ongoing development and expansion of the World Wide Web (the Web)—a huge information platform that has provided vast opportunities for people by making it possible to effectively solve various tasks in business, education, science, and our everyday lives. With the help of the Web, a person can pay bills, buy products and services, complete university degrees online, search for and read articles, keep contact with their friends and so much more. However, these opportunities are not available for everybody. For example, people who are blind encounter a lot of problems surfing the Web. This is a direct result of the majority of web pages being orientated at sighted users and not taking into account users who are blind. Blind users perceive the world differently and therefore need effective mechanisms for navigation through the elements on a web page and the thorough understanding of their semantic role in order to obtain an overview of a page in a few moments and perform a search. Current approaches provide us with limited solutions in the pursuit of particular goals such as web page segmentation or text summarization. Moreover, most approaches consider non-visual web page representations, such as source code (X/HTML and XML) and tree representations (the tag tree and DOM tree) which do not reflect the semantics that is analyzed by sighted users and posed exclusively on the rendered web page. This fact explains the limitations of such methods. The goal of this thesis is to enhance the accessibility of web pages for blind users. In order to achieve this goal, we propose a complex solution covering the problems of automatic understanding of a web page’s functional elements on the rendered web pages and navigation. Firstly, we provide the means for web page analysis and understanding on the visual level which carries the main information presented not only by the textual content, but also by the layout, styles and other visual characteristics perceivable by sighted users. Secondly, the challenges in improving web mobility of blind users based on the recognized logical elements of a web page are considered in detail and solutions are proposed. Considering the complexity in the analysis of visual characteristics, close attention is payed to the modeling of a web page’s visual features defined in the Unified Ontological Model (UOM) as well as developing methods and techniques for querying the model and approaches for realizing methods for web page understanding and information extraction. The uniqueness of the Unified Ontological Model (UOM) is based on its integration of different aspects of a web page in one v consistent model, such as geometry of the layout with quantitative and qualitative characteristics, interface with different functional elements and structures, and the DOM tree. The proposed cross-platform framework, Web Page Processing System (WPPS), ensures an efficient generation of the UOM according to the provided configuration and conveys an application programming interface (API) for developing methods and algorithms of web page processing. The WPPS demonstrated its effectiveness in developing methods of web page segmentation, web object identification and information extraction. For enhancing web accessibility based on the identified web page elements, the Multi-Axial Navigation Model (MANM) and navigation methodology are proposed in this thesis. Blindzilla, a cross-platform system which demonstrated its effectiveness in an evaluation with blind users, implements these concepts. Kurzfassung Chancengleichheit bei selbständiger Entwicklung und Aktualisierung für alle ist ein wichti- ges Merkmal zivilisierter Gesellschaften. In der heutigen Informationsgesellschaft findet dieser Aspekt eine seiner Umsetzungen in der Verbesserung des Zugangs verschiedener Bevölkerungs- gruppen zu Informationsressourcen. Information ist ein unabdingbarer Teil des heutigen Lebens. Diese Tatsache verdeutlicht die laufende Entwicklung und Expansion des World Wide Web (des Internets) – einer riesigen Informationsplattform, die für Menschen große Chancen eröffnet hat, indem sie die effiziente Lösung von Aufgaben im Geschäftsleben, in der Bildung, der Wissen- schaft und in unserem täglichen Leben ermöglicht. Mit Hilfe des Internets kann man Rechnungen bezahlen, Produkte und Dienstleistungen kaufen, an einer Fernuniversität studieren, nach Artikeln suchen und sie lesen, Kontakt mit FreundInnen halten und vieles mehr. Diese Möglichkeiten stehen jedoch nicht allen offen. Zum Beispiel sind blinde Menschen beim Surfen im Internet mit vielen Problemen konfrontiert. Dies liegt an der Orientierung der überwiegenden Mehrheit von Webseiten an sehenden BenutzerInnen, ohne Berücksichtigung von blinden BenutzerInnen. Blinde BenutzerInnen