"NavAccess: Improving website navigation for blind Internet users"
                             Hans Hillen
               University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

The Internet can be extremely valuable to blind people. It allows them to
perform actions which they usually cannot manage without assistance. However,
the increasingly complex web based content and inaccessible web design still
cause a lot of websites to be impossible, hard, or tedious to navigate.
Guidelines such as the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative or Section 508 of
the Rehabilitation Act, provide roadmaps for webdevelopers to create more
accessible content, but are still ignored or not applied to the degree that
is needed. This lack of accessibility presents many problems for blind users,
who are dependent on assistive technology to provide linear output such as
speech (screen readers) and touch (refreshable Braille displays) for website
navigation. 

This study specifically addressed solutions which allow blind users to deal
with inaccessible websites and focuses on website navigation. User
observation sessions have been carried out to identify strategies blind users
adopt to successfully navigate the Internet. The project has resulted in the
development of the publicly available Navaccess tool, recently demonstrated
at the CSUN 2006 "Technology and Persons with Disabilities" Conference.
Collaboration has started with the Mozilla foundation to continue further
development of Navaccess as a Mozilla Firefox extension. The module currently
completed focuses specifically on reducing cognitive overload. 

Who should attend: Anybody who has an interest in Internet accessibility,
speech interfaces or solutions for the visually impaired. 

About the Speaker: Hans Hillen is part of the Human Computer Studies
Laboratory of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research
interests are non visual website navigation and alternative path creation
through webcontent.  He is currently active as an accessibility extension
developer for the Mozilla Firefox browser. 

Links:
Hans Hillen
hhillen@science.uva.nl

NavAccess: An Auditory Based Navigation Tool for the Blind
http://sigchi.nt4all.nl/documents/Hillen%20-%20NavAccess.pdf