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Trailblazer: enabling blind users to blaze trails through the web

Published: 08 February 2009 Publication History

Abstract

For blind web users, completing tasks on the web can be frustrating. Each step can require a time-consuming linear search of the current web page to find the needed interactive element or piece of information. Existing interactive help systems and the playback components of some programming-by-demonstration tools identify the needed elements of a page as they guide the user through predefined tasks, obviating the need for a linear search on each step. We introduce TrailBlazer, a system that provides an accessible, non-visual interface to guide blind users through existing how-to knowledge. A formative study indicated that participants saw the value of TrailBlazer but wanted to use it for tasks and web sites for which no existing script was available. To address this, TrailBlazer offers suggestion-based help created on-the-fly from a short, user-provided task description and an existing repository of how-to knowledge. In an evaluation on 15 tasks, the correct prediction was contained within the top 5 suggestions 75.9% of the time.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      IUI '09: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
      February 2009
      522 pages
      ISBN:9781605581682
      DOI:10.1145/1502650
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 08 February 2009

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      Author Tags

      1. blind users
      2. non-visual interfaces
      3. programming-by-demonstration
      4. suggestions
      5. web accessibility

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      IUI09
      IUI09: 14th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
      February 8 - 11, 2009
      Florida, Sanibel Island, USA

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      Cited By

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      • (2023)Enabling Efficient Web Data-Record Interaction for People with Visual Impairments via Proxy InterfacesACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems10.1145/357936413:3(1-27)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2023
      • (2023)“Give me happy pop songs in C major and with a fast tempo”International Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103007173:COnline publication date: 1-May-2023
      • (2023)Streamlining Personal Data Access Requests: From Obstructive Procedures to Automated Web WorkflowsWeb Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-34444-2_9(111-125)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2023
      • (2022)“Every Website Is a Puzzle!”: Facilitating Access to Common Website Features for People with Visual ImpairmentsACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/351903215:3(1-35)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2022
      • (2022)InSupport: Proxy Interface for Enabling Efficient Non-Visual Interaction with Web Data RecordsProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3490099.3511126(49-62)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2022
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      • (2021)Semantic table-of-contents for efficient web screen readingProceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3412841.3442066(1941-1949)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2021
      • (2021)Screen2Vec: Semantic Embedding of GUI Screens and GUI ComponentsProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445049(1-15)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
      • (2021)Examining Visual Semantic Understanding in Blind and Low-Vision Technology UsersProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445040(1-14)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
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