Bringing Cognitive Augmentation to Web Browsing Accessibility

TL;DR

This paper investigates how cognitive augmentation via conversational agents can enhance web browsing accessibility for blind and visually impaired users, focusing on a framework and prototype for structural and content-based support.

Contribution

It introduces a conceptual framework and an early prototype for supporting blind users through heuristic-based structural and content analysis in conversational web browsing.

Findings

Developed a framework for accessible conversational web browsing

Created an early prototype leveraging structural heuristics

Identified challenges in automatic support for BVIP users

Abstract

In this paper we explore the opportunities brought by cognitive augmentation to provide a more natural and accessible web browsing experience. We explore these opportunities through \textit{conversational web browsing}, an emerging interaction paradigm for the Web that enables blind and visually impaired users (BVIP), as well as regular users, to access the contents and features of websites through conversational agents. Informed by the literature, our previous work and prototyping exercises, we derive a conceptual framework for supporting BVIP conversational web browsing needs, to then focus on the challenges of automatically providing this support, describing our early work and prototype that leverage heuristics that consider structural and content features only.