Abstract
Information accessibility on World Wide Web (WWW) still remains to be a complex issue for blind users as majority of websites are invaded by contents, both non-visual (audio) and visual (video & images). Accessibility measures in terms of a usable and blind-friendly website should be made available to blind users. A particular area that can be improved on is the e-Business segment for blinds. Easily-accessible, e-Business platforms could further promote entrepreneurship practices through the development of blind-friendly features such as voice. In current study, we investigated the existing difficulties (such as inconsistent webpage structure, incompetent voice recognition engines and use of long sentences as commands, etc) to access the web-content and suggested a different (numeric hotlist) approach, in order to make the web more accessible, exclusively for blinds.
Highlights
Most web applications attract a majority of users but still the efforts to make them blind-friendly are not enough
A consistent structure by using headings and lists would really facilitate to state the browsing issues as we www.ccsenet.org/cis propose the idea of using Numeric Hotlist for navigating a webpage through voice, which would assist blind users to interact with the system more naturally
The term web accessibility refers to easy access by all, Web Accessibility Initiative, a group managed by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), describes web accessibility as to create and develop the web in such a way that allows blind and older people to access but contribute to the web same as any normal person Talib, Shuqin, Abrar & Shafiq (2009)
Summary
Most web applications attract a majority of users but still the efforts to make them blind-friendly are not enough. Waibel & Lee (1990) pioneered the voice technology systems which enabled tasks such as bank balance inquiries, flight schedules and phone call transfers. Such voice technology-related advancements were especially useful in the field of medicine, acknowledged later on by Bajgoric (2006). Future would certainly bring a lot of technological advancements but the pace of development, in this particular area (voice enabled systems), remains to be slow. The paper is structured as follows; Section 2 provides a brief literature review on existing voice technology and its weaknesses.
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