Abstract

The SWANS(Semantic Web Accessibility Network Services) is a research project which addresses immobility issues of people with visual impairment (VI’s) and explores the ways of transforming their lives using Semantic Web Services (SWS). This project is divided into two parts: a) design and develop a prototype using Web Services(WS) and then examine its usability for VI’s, b) transform this new prototype to semantic and test its accessibility. This paper focuses only the first part of this project. The new prototype was designed and developed in Microsoft Dot Net Framework, Active Server Pages (ASP . NET 2.0) and C #(C sharp) language for VI’s. This research was completed with the collaboration of Cambridge Online-Pathways project and Cam- sight. These are charity organizations and their aim is to raise awareness of how the use of computers can enhance the confidence and independence of disabled or disadvantaged people. These organizations are also helping them to explore new opportunities for education, employment and leisure using adaptive technologies. In this prototype, the author used SWANS’s web services. In addition to these Google web service-Google map was also used to get information about two specific points of journey in the Cambridgeshire. Currently VI’s use commercially available screen reader or magnifier to read or magnify the contents of Web or Internet. However our specifically designed prototype according to the tailored requirements of the VI’s has enabled them to access its contents without using any additional adaptive software. Hence this prototype could be a model for the web publishing industry. It was essential to examine the accessibility level of this new prototype; therefore a qualitative approach was used to examine the human computer interaction (HCI) of the focus group using this new prototype. The author used direct observations, open-ended interviews, participant observations and physical artifacts as sources of evidence to collect data. In order to make the data more reliable the author adopted a multiple-case study approach. Therefore the focus group consisted of fifteen people. One participant was colour blind, three were blind and remaining eleven were VI’s. All participants were eighteen years old or above. A questionnaire was conducted at the end of this study to verify these results. The focus group was asked to complete a series of tasks and answer questions about each task completed.