Widget identification and modification for web 2.0 access technologies (WIMWAT)

Abstract

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) encourage World Wide Web (Web) content to be extracted and remixed from dif-ferent sources, so that presented content can be updated in small chunks, rather than reloading the entire Web page. These concepts change the way Web pages are created and how users interact with them. Hence, these changes will require assistive technologies to adapt to them. We intro-duce the concept of identifying and modifying embedded code within a Web page (widget) during development, so that widgets that are not in an accessible form, and which produce inaccessible content can be modi ed. Our concept can be also applied as an enhancement for screen readers, so that they can provide a preview facility of the types of features provided by the widgets. Currently, we are investi-gating di erent methods for detecting widgets from the Web page's source code. An evaluation of our detection methods has been carried out; this was an attempt to search for two types of widgets from the top twenty Websites. The evalu-ation successfully detected all widgets, suggesting that our identi cation methods are successful, although some false positives were also detected. Since we are in our initial stage, further investigations will be required to re ne our methods, and pursue the observation and modi cation phases required by the project.