Combining SADIe and AxsJAX to improve the accessibility of web content

Abstract

The advent of Web 2.0 technologies has allowed once static Web documents to be transformed into online interactive applications. To facilitate the accessibility of this dynamic content, Google have developed the AxsJAX framework that can insert Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) statements into the content dynamically. Such statements allow assistive technologies to interact with dynamic content and make it accessible to users. SADIe is an approach that uses semantic annotations of a Website's Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to drive a transformation process that can improve access to Web pages for visually impaired users who use a screen reader. Previously SADIe transcoded static pages by refactoring the content into a format more suited to the sequential audio output of a screen reader. In this paper we present a prototype SADIe transcoder that uses CSS annotations to generate AxsJAX framework code and insert it into Web pages. Such an approach allows users to access static content using a consistent set of key presses in a manner akin to an online application. This demonstrates the flexibility of the SADIe approach as the same annotations can be used to generate an alternative transcoding format. It also supports the use of SADIe as a lightweight method for allowing Web designers to make use of AxsJAX without requiring knowledge of the underlying AxsJAX technologies.