One-Thousand Words

1
One-Thousand Words
Enriching Digital Images to Improve Information
Accessibility

• Peter Parente
• Enabling Technology
• Spring 2003
• Final Presentation

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Information Accessibility

• The accessibility of information is a measure of
  how well a person can investigate and comprehend
  new knowledge from a given source, despite his or
  her method of access.

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Assistive Tech Redefined

• An assistive technology is any tool, system, or
  service that either improves a persons
  functional capabilities or improves access to
  aspects of modern society.

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Visual Information

• Growing number of images, movies, etc. on the
  Internet
• Very inaccessible
• ALT attributes left blank
• Images used for page layout
• Often overlooked by screen readers
• We can do better, but most websites dont

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Related Work

• Three areas of focus
• Convert images to text
• Convert images to sound
• Convert images to touch

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Images to Text

• Image ALT attributes
• Webpage transcoding (Asakawa, Huang, Takagi, et
  al. 2000-2002)

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Images to Sound

• WebSound (Petrucci, et al., 2000)
• AB-Web (Roth, 1998)
• The vOICe (Meijer, 1996)

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Images to touch

• Ifeelpixel (2002)
• Pin grid arrays
• Braille printed images (Ina, 1996)

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Two Improvements

• I argue that all of the work in this area can be
  improved in two ways

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The Single Method Problem

• There is no replacement for vision
• No single alternative is as rich as vision

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A Solution

• Combining techniques helps compensate for
  weaknesses
• Pretty obvious, but not often implemented

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The Single Author Problem

• Content authors are not omniscient
• One person or organization can only know and do
  so much
• Results in content that meets the needs of the
  authors and their intended audience

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Another Solution

• Content amateurs
• Let anyone with a vested interested in
  accessibility enrich any existing image,
  regardless of ownership

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Hypothesis

The accessibility and quality of digital
information, especially that on the Internet, can
be improved by a community of knowledgeable users
who work together to enrich existing
contentincluding content which they do not
ownwith new facts and features important to
members of that community. In such a system,
passive web browsing is replaced by the active
process of web augmentation in which new
information is shared, viewed, edited, and
further enriched by other members of the
community.
Blah blah blah
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The Short Version

• Communities of users
• Working together to improve web accessibility and
  quality
• Ability to add, remove, change any content on any
  webpage

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Enrichments

• Packets of new information and features added to
  an image
• Text
• Graphics
• Sounds
• Speech
• Touch

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Software

• Three programs
• Editor helps users create enrichments
• Repository stores enrichments for later editing
  and viewing
• Viewer augments images in a web browser with
  enrichments

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Use Case

• Prototype enrichments only support speech and
  sound
• Demo

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Evaluation

• Editor used briefly by one teacher, one OM
  specialist
• Viewer needs more work before testing

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Future Work

• Enrichments for other types of information
• Entire websites? Programs? Operating systems?
• Online enrichment communities
• How to build, moderate, maintain?

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Thanks

• Gary Bishop
• For not giving up on getting the awful Microsoft
  Accessibility library working
• Diane Brauner
• For her helpful pointers and conversations