Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  The ACM Web4All Conference (W4A) is the premier venue for research focused on web accessibility. It brings together a diverse community committed to making the web inclusive for users of all abilities and backgrounds. This year, the 22nd International Web for All Conference (W4A 2025) was held at the ICC Sydney: International Convention & Exhibition Centre in Sydney, Australia, from April 28–29, 2025. In this blog post, I highlight my work titled “ AccessMenu: Enhancing Usability of Online Restaurant Menus for Screen Reader Users ,” which addresses the accessibility challenges faced by blind and visually impaired (BVI) users when navigating image-based restaurant menus online. Figure 1 Venkatraman et al.: (A) A sample restaurant menu in its original visual form. (B) The output produced by JAWS Convenient OCR when applied to the menu. (C) The AccessMenu interface, where the red box highlights the natural language query field, the yellow box marks the voice-input button, and...

  On May 7, 2025,  we  held our fourth annual  WS-DL Research Expo .   We continued the same format as the prior years ( 2024 ,  2023 ,  2022  &  2021 ), with one student from each WS-DL professor giving a short overview of their research.  Links to all the materials (slides, papers, software, data) are gathered in the GitHub  repo , but repeated here are the links for the students and their presentations:   Kritika Garg :  Not Here, Go There: Analyzing Redirection Patterns on the Web Kumushini Thennakoon :  Beyond Gaze Overlap: Analyzing Joint Visual Attention Dynamics Using Egocentric Data Lamia Salsabil :  A Context-Based Ensemble Classifier for Open Access Dataset and Software URLs in Scholarly Documents Akshay Nayak :  Adapting Online Customer Reviews for Blind Users: A Case Study of Restaurant Reviews Jhon G. Botello :  Exploring Large Language Models for Analyzing Changes in Web Archive ...

     The ACM Capital Region Celebration of Women in Computing (CAPWIC) 2025 conference took place on March 29, 2025, and it was hosted by the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. CAPWIC provides a low-cost, regionally tailored platform for women and minorities in computing, including students, faculty, professionals, and supporters.  This year, CAPWIC welcomed 193 attendees from universities, high schools, companies, and non-profit organizations. The majority were undergraduate students (41%), followed by graduate students (36%), college and university faculty (15%), industry professionals (4%), and high school students (3%). Eight Ph.D. students in Computer Science from ODU attended the CAPWIC 2025 conference. Among them, five students from ODU's  Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) research group participated in person, presenting research shorts and posters. Ph.D. students from ODU Computer Science at the CAPWIC 2025 conference at George ...