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Presenter(s)
Hidemasa Muta
Takuya Ohko
Hideshi Yoshinaga
Tokyo Research Laboratory
IBM Japan, Ltd.
This session introduces an ActiveX-based accessibility solution to make a specific web site accessible for senior citizens without changing the site content.
Introduction
The ratio of senior citizens within the population will increase very soon and very rapidly in many countries. However, there are many obstructions to senior citizens' access to the Internet. Due to complications from weak eyesight, most seniors are uncomfortable about browsing Web pages crammed full of information using small, hard-to-read fonts. Even though there are assistive technology products, they aren't easy for the elderly to install and set up.
On the other hand, governments around the world are noticing that accessibility is a very important concern when developing their e-government services without creating a digital divide. Many e-commerce companies also find that senior citizens are very important customers to build up their business. However they don't have good solutions to make their Web sites accessible, especially for senior citizens wanting easy-to-understand operations. Most of these Web site owners already have a lot of content. It is hard to redesign the sites to meet senior citizens' requirements. Also, sometimes younger people's requirements and senior citizens' requirement are quite different. If the Web site owners redesign their content especially for senior citizens, that is not always comfortable for younger people. Our ActiveX-based accessibility solution, Easy Web Browsing*, solves these complicated problems.
Solution
We are working to develop an ActiveX-based accessibility solution to add senior-friendly features to existing Web sites. It is provided as an additional ActiveX object for the specific Web site. Features include enlarging and reading aloud at the location selected with the mouse, and optimization of Web pages by zooming and changing the colors according to the users' preferences. When a user puts the cursor on the Web content, this solution enlarges that part of the page and reads the text information aloud. To announce that a new page is being loaded, an intuitive interaction method with a distinctive sound is used. Web content optimization is easily done by clicking the menu buttons. The menu bar for operations has easy-to-use icons for the essential operations. Text and background colors can be changed to suit a user's preferences. Some users who suffer from cataracts may want to change the display to black text with a yellow background. It automatically switches the language of the messages in its GUI and the language of the text-to-speech engine according to the language tags in the Web pages. Supported languages include Japanese, English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Chinese. Figures 1 and 2 show examples of the user interface.
(Figure 1. User Interfaces)
(Figure 2. Magnified Web Page)
This solution does not require Web site owners to change their existing Web content. They only need to upload this ActiveX object to their web server, and then create a link to start it. This solution is only effective on the specific Web site, and only effective when the user desires to use it. This design allows Web site owners to keep their Web content stylish for the younger people, while enabling senior citizens to access them with the assistive technologies provided by this ActiveX object. It runs seamlessly from the Web site using a secure method. All of the required software components are automatically downloaded and set up by clicking the link to these additional ActiveX object. Figure 3 shows the startup sequence.
(Figure 3. Startup Sequence)
The required ActiveX component includes a text-to-speech engine that is more than 4 MB for each language. The ActiveX object doesn't need to wait until this download is complete for the text-to-speech engine, because this takes too long over a low-bandwidth connection. The text-to-speech engine is downloaded as a background process after the ActiveX object starts. It provides these senior friendly features except for the speech function while the text-to-speech engine is still downloading. When the text-to-speech engine is available, the ActiveX object begins to speak.
This background text-to-speech engine downloading mechanism enables quick startup and rich speech functions at the same time. It also starts to download a new text-to-speech engine as a background process when the user first visit a Web page written in an unavailable language. For example, when the user jumps from and English page to a Spanish page, the ActiveX object starts to download the Spanish text-to-speech engine as a background process so it can speak Spanish when it is available.
Benefits
We provide benefits for Web site owners and for the users.
Web site owner's gain is accessibility improvement for their Web sites without re-designing their web content for senior citizens. This ActiveX-based accessibility solution can work with any existing Web content on any type of Web server, so it is very simple and easy to install. It is also easy to maintain. In order to update this solution for each user's environment, all the Web site owners need to do is to replace the ActiveX object on their Web sites.
The user's benefit is also clear. It is not only the accessibility improvements, but also the no-cost use of the accessibility solution, because all the necessary costs are paid by the Web site owners. This is a new business model to provide accessibility solutions.
Conclusions
The system has already been introduced by some of Japan's IT leaders among local governments, ministries of the central government, and IT companies. Examples include Gifu Prefecture, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, and Canon Inc. Figure 4 shows user survey results from the Canon site. Most of the users evaluated it as easy to understand and useful [4].
(Figure 4. User Survey Results)
Providing user-friendly operations integrated with accessibility features for senior citizens, and an easy-to-manage system for Web site owners, this solution increases customer satisfaction.
References
[1] H. Yoshinaga, H. Muta, and T. Ohko "Easy Web Browsing - Accessibility solution for Web-based customer service", IBM PLTE EMT-10, March 7, 2004 [2] H. Muta, T. Ohko and H. Yoshinaga "Easy Web Browsing and its business model", IBM Professional Papers, September, 2003 [3] H. Muta "Easy Web Browsing Promotional Video", March, 2002 [4] Canon Inc. "Easy Web Browsing user survey", Dec 26, 2003
Endnotes
*Trademark or registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation.
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