WebInSight:: making web images accessible

  • Authors:

  • Jeffrey P. Bigham;Ryan S. Kaminsky;Richard E. Ladner;Oscar M. Danielsson;Gordon L. Hempton

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Washington, Seattle, WA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Images without alternative text are a barrier to equal web access for blind users. To illustrate the problem, we conducted a series of studies that conclusively show that a large fraction of significant images have no alternative text. To ameliorate this problem, we introduce WebInSight, a system that automatically creates and inserts alternative text into web pages on-the-fly. To formulate alternative text for images, we present three labeling modules based on web context analysis, enhanced optical character recognition (OCR) and human labeling. The system caches alternative text in a local database and can add new labels seamlessly after a web page is downloaded, resulting in minimal impact to the browsing experience.