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Personalizable edge services for Web accessibility

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Abstract

Web Content Accessibility guidelines by W3C (W3C Recommendation, May 1999. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/) provide several suggestions for Web designers regarding how to author Web pages in order to make them accessible to everyone. In this context, this paper proposes the use of edge services as an efficient and general solution to promote accessibility and breaking down the digital barriers that inhibit users with disabilities to actively participate to any aspect of society. The idea behind edge services mainly affect the advantages of a personalized navigation in which contents are tailored according to different issues, such as client’s devices capabilities, communication systems and network conditions and, finally, preferences and/or abilities of the growing number of users that access the Web. To meet these requirements, Web designers have to efficiently provide content adaptation and personalization functionalities mechanisms in order to guarantee universal access to the Internet content. The so far dominant paradigm of communication on the WWW, due to its simple request/response model, cannot efficiently address such requirements. Therefore, it must be augmented with new components that attempt to enhance the scalability, the performances and the ubiquity of the Web. Edge servers, acting on the HTTP data flow exchanged between client and server, allow on-the-fly content adaptation as well as other complex functionalities beyond the traditional caching and content replication services. These value-added services are called edge services and include personalization and customization, aggregation from multiple sources, geographical personalization of the navigation of pages (with insertion/emphasis of content that can be related to the user’s geographical location), translation services, group navigation and awareness for social navigation, advanced services for bandwidth optimization such as adaptive compression and format transcoding, mobility, and ubiquitous access to Internet content. This paper presents Personalizable Accessible Navigation (Pan) that is a set of edge services designed to improve Web pages accessibility, developed and deployed on top of a programmable intermediary framework. The characteristics and the location of the services, i.e., provided by intermediaries, as well as the personalization and the opportunities to select multiple profiles make Pan a platform that is especially suitable for accessing the Web seamlessly also from mobile terminals.

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Notes

  1. http://www.lighthouse.org/.

  2. http://rabbit-proxy.sourceforge.net.

  3. http://www.privoxy.org.

  4. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/activities.

  5. http://www-306.ibm.com/software/pervasive/transcodingpublisher/.

  6. The values used in the algorithm have been qualitatively tested with several colorblind users and with the Vischeck simulator described in [15].

  7. Landscape, 1890. Oil on canvas. The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA.

  8. Images on the right-hand side of Figs. 8 and 9 are obtained with the Vischeck simulator described in [15].

  9. It must be noticed that the prototype was an ad hoc implementation of the filters and that it did not allow (e.g.) any configuration, profiling, and personalization.

  10. It was one of the partners of the WHITE project.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support and the interesting discussions within the ISIS Lab. In particular, we thank Angelo Esposito for collaborating in the implementation of CSS restyling Pan service. Part of the research was supported by EU “Leonardo da Vinci” project Web for handicap integrated training environment (WHITE), I/03/B/F/PP-154143, 2003. We also thank all the WHITE’s partners, and, in particular, the Accademia Musicale di Caserta and Emilio Di Donato for his help during the testing. We thank all the users that volunteered for testing our Pan. Finally we thank the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments and suggestions which considerably helped us in improving the paper.

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  1. ISISLab, Dipartimento di Informatica ed Applicazioni “R.M. Capocelli”, Università di Salerno, Salerno, Italy

    Ugo Erra, Gennaro Iaccarino, Delfina Malandrino & Vittorio Scarano

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  1. Ugo Erra
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  2. Gennaro Iaccarino
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  3. Delfina Malandrino
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  4. Vittorio Scarano
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Correspondence to Ugo Erra.

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A URLs used for Bobby’s testing

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Erra, U., Iaccarino, G., Malandrino, D. et al. Personalizable edge services for Web accessibility. Univ Access Inf Soc 6, 285–306 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-007-0091-y

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