TrailBlazer: Enabling Blind Users to Blaze Trails Through the Web

My comments on other blogs:



Authors:
Jeffrey P. Bigham - University of Washington
Tessa Lau - IBM Almaden Research Center
Jeffrey Nichols - IBM Almaden Research Center

Summary:
This paper introduces a problem concerning how blind computer users use the web.  Although there already exists screen readers to help a blind person navigate a web page, this process is time consuming and takes substantially longer than it would for a person with the ability to see.

Sometimes web developers provide annotations and other meta data to a page that can be interpreted by screen readers to help navigate these pages.  However, the actually implementation of this is costly to the software developer and is often left out of most web pages.  Also, the structuring of websites is not strict so a simple algorithm to extract key data cannot be implemented to work for every web page.

TrailBlazer provides scripts that can be written for pages that help to annotate types of pages.  The example given in the paper is an airline web page.  The goal is to generalize these scripts as much as possible so that they can be applied in various situations.  For instance, if you have a script for airline website A but not for airline website B, TrailBlazer can apply the script to airline website B as well.  If the script cannot be easily applied, it attempts to create a script to help guide the blind user through the web page.

TrailBlazer can also be used to intelligently search for more information.  It has been proven to get the top result of a web search in a list of the "top 5 possible websites matching your query" 75.9% of the time.  The accuracy is crucial because even with help of the navigational script of TrailBlazer, it still takes a blind user more time to navigate a page than it would if they could simply glance at the content.

Discussion:
This paper didn't convince me that this is the "best new thing" for blind users and that is disappointing.  While I do not know that much about screen readers or how blind people navigate the web, this still does not seem like a solid system for navigating pages.  It still requires the user to memorize a large amount of keyboard commands that may or may not be along with the standard commands.  While I believe that it is good that research is being done to help those that have this extra difficulty, TrailBlazer did not seem to be a 100% viable solution to the problem and only added an additional strain to the blind user.