Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Figure 1: The virtual cover of the IUI '22 conference. In 2022, there were 268 million online shoppers in the United States. This number will increase to almost 285 million online shoppers in 2025. It’s become a much easier way to shop, considering that it doesn’t require you to leave your house. People every day go to online websites to buy their goods based on their preferences. An e-commerce website like Walmart or Amazon consists of web data records that are integral components of many websites [Figure 2]. These websites present structured information by querying from a database. Examples include a list of products or services, such as items on a shopping website, available hotel rooms on a travel website, and so on. In this blog, I will discuss our work titled “ InSupport: Proxy Interface for Enabling Efficient Non-Visual Interaction with Web Data Records. ” which was published at the 27th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces . The work focuses on improvi...

Figure 1: Based on the guidelines and the study, the authors built a browser plug-in to make the table more accessible. Tables are an excellent medium for sighted people to understand the data's structure and contents. They are popular in many online documents, including news articles, government reports, and online applications like bank statements. It uses many visual metaphors that sighted people can quickly notice. Those metaphors facilitate an understanding structure without explicitly explaining the complex system. But you can imagine how hard it would be for people with visual impairments who need to use a screen reader, which linearizes all this information. Imagine how confusing it would be when the user's cursor is on top of an empty cell. For example, the screen reader doesn't say anything. The user might think they didn't press the key or need instruction of guidelines to access the multilevel merge cell. Yanan Wang et al. recently published a paper on “ Wh...

Figure 1 : Video (A)  contains no information about accessibility. Video accessibility metrics (B),  BVI people using it C) to filter or quickly identify accessible videos from search results. (Source: ACM ) Text-based documents, articles, reviews, and reports were the main information sources on the internet. In late 2000, the Internet became mainstream . Among the attractions of this mainstream, Youtube was a popular search platform for watching videos, reaching 81% of internet users .  These videos give so much information such as a tutorial, lecture, unboxing video, review, and more that people increasingly use videos instead of text to communicate information. In fact, based on a report provided by YouTube, there are 1 billion hours of videos being played each day on YouTube alone. These videos provide information, both auditory and visually, but the visual content in videos is not accessible to blind and visually impaired (BVI) audience members. Traditionally, to m...