Abstract
People with visual impairments, particularly blind people face alot of difficulties browsing the web with assistive technologies such as screen readers, when websites do not conform to accessibility standards and are thus inaccessible. HTML is the basic language for website design but its ALT attribute on the IMG element does not adequately capture comprehensive image semantics and description in a way that can be accurately interpreted by screen readers, hence blind people do not usually get the complete description of the image. Most of the problems however arise from web designers and developers not including a description of an image or not comprehensively describing these images to people with visual impairments. In this paper, we propose the use of the Image Description Assessment Tool (IDAT), a Java-based tool containing some proposed heuristics for assessing how well an image description matches the real content of the image on the web. The tool also contains a speech interface which can enable a visually impaired individual to listen to the description of an image that has been uploaded unto the system.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Department of Computer Science, University of Hull, UK for funding that enabled this research to be carried out and presented. Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their comments and to Shawulu H. Nggada for his insightful comments on refining and improving IDAT.
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Nganji, J.T., Brayshaw, M., Tompsett, B. (2013). Describing and Assessing Image Descriptions for Visually Impaired Web Users with IDAT. In: Kudělka, M., Pokorný, J., Snášel, V., Abraham, A. (eds) Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Intelligent Human Computer Interaction (IHCI 2011), Prague, Czech Republic, August, 2011. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 179. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31603-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31603-6_3
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