Chapter 19 - TrailBlazer: Enabling blind users to blaze trails through the Web

Abstract

This chapter provides TrailBlazer that can accurately predict the next step that users are likely to perform on the basis of an initial action and provides an accessible interface enabling blind users to leverage those suggestions. A next step will be user studies with blind Web users to study how they use the system and discover improvements on the provided interface to suggestions. Guiding Web users through completing Web tasks has many applications beyond improving access for blind Web users. The TrailBlazer approach adapts easily to commonly used phone menu systems. Because of the reduction in complexity achieved by guiding users, the TrailBlazer approach may also be appropriate for certain users with learning or cognitive disabilities. Additionally, users of small screen devices face many of the same problems as screen reader users do in finding relevant information on complex Web pages and may benefit from a similar approach. Interfaces for nonvisual access could benefit from moving toward task-level assistance of the kind exposed by TrailBlazer. Current interfaces too often focus on either low-level annotations or deciding beforehand what users will want to do, taking away their control.