Extend an Open-Source Browser to Assist the Visual Impaired People in Browsing Wretch Blog

• Main Authors: Jian-Ming Huang, 黃建銘
• Other Authors: Dow-Ming Yeh
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/85019704189006793040

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 資訊教育研究所 === 96 === As the WWW prevails in every aspects of our life, all kinds of information can be accessed easily on the Internet. WWW surfing becomes a necessary skills in the modern world. Therefore, many web applications will be developed, like as Blog. Now many people will use it to show their information to this world and the usage is board in social concern. According to the Institute for Information Industry’s ACI-FIND research statistics, the number of Internet users reached to 10 million people in September 2007, with an Internet popularity rate of 44%. However, it is difficult for the visual impaired to obtain information through browsing the WWW. It is true that there are many assist devices for the visual impaired nowadays such as Guide Mouse System, big eye, and so on. But there are still many obstacles that hinder their browsing. For example, all the assistant devices can not identify pictures, flash, and the like. When a visual impaired user tries to browse a webpage, he must spend much time to research the whole webpage to grasp its meaning. The main goal of this research is to design an extension to an open source browser so that it is more convenient to browse Blog for the visual impaired people. The browser under study is Firefox and the main development tool is JavaScript and XUL. We will take the Wretch Blog as the target of our test and the extension prototype makes the visual impaired people find out the information what they want quickly and easily. According to Wretch Blog of the user choose, this extension will get related HTML data from Blog and present it in a new webpage which includes the Blog titles, articles, date and eliminates the unnecessary information, such as pictures, advertisements, and so on. The style of the new webpage is based on web accessibility guidelines and the visual impaired people can browse the news contents quickly through a screen reader. The result of this research is expected to cut down research time for the visual impaired to explore a new webpage.