Part of the School of Computer Science’s Information Management Group.
The growth of Web 2.0 technologies is fundamentally changing the way that people interact with the Web. A short time ago, navigating the Web was simply a matter of clicking links, moving from one static page to another. Now it’s possible to spend a considerable amount of time interacting with a single page through its “dynamic micro content” – items such as tickers, slideshows, videos, search facilities – that update independently, without changing the URL. For a good example of this in action, take a look at the Yahoo! or iGoogle Web portals.
These Web pages provide an exciting, interactive experience for sighted users. For visually disabled users, however, they simply result in further barriers to accessibility. Adaptive technologies, such as screen readers, are currently unable to deal with dynamic updates.
The SASWAT project aims to address this, by understanding the sighted user’s experience, and mapping this to audio for visually disabled users.
There are two parallel strands to the SASWAT research:
We consider that viewing dynamic Web pages has many of the characteristics of a conversation. As the user reads the page, so the topic of conversation changes. If some of this information changes, how do we tell the user? Is the information sufficiently important that we must interrupt immediately, or has the conversation moved on sufficiently that the change is of little interest? We aim to use eye-tracking studies to develop a model of how attention is allocated when users interact with dynamic Web pages, and use this model as a basis for controlling information flow so that interaction can occur as naturally as possible.
Dynamic updates can be classified into patterns according to how the user interacts with them, and developers often use patterns from libraries such as the Yahoo! pattern library when developing sites. Can analysis of where and how these patterns are implemented be combined with experimental data about how people use them to suggest ways of presentation? In particular, can developers use pattern class as a basis for making the update more accessible, e.g., through ARIA markup?