Improving Usability of Web Pages for Blinds

Warranting the access to Web contents to any citizen, even to people with physical disabilities, is a major concern of many government organizations. Although guidelines for Web developers have been proposed by international organisations (such as the W3C) to make Web site contents accessible, the wider part of today´s Web sites are not completely usable by peoples with sight disabilities. In this paper, two different approaches for dynamically transforming Web pages into aural Web pages, i.e. pages that are optimised for blind peoples, will be presented. The approaches exploit heuristic techniques for summarising Web pages contents and providing them to blind users in order to improve the usability of Web sites. The techniques have been validated in an experiment where usability metrics have been used to assess the effectiveness of the Web page transformation techniques.