World Wide Web Browsers for blind people

Ruth Hayward

The aim of my final year project is to investigate the current problems faced by blind users when accessing the World Wide Web. This involves looking at HTML standards and web page guidelines to highlight possible problem areas in the design of pages available on the Internet. However, the problems do not stop here. Even if pages are designed so that they are fully accessible to blind users, there may still be problems if the user cannot use the software to access them. This is where the other part of my project comes in. I have chosen three web browsers:

Netscape (very graphically oriented)
DOSLynx (a text based browser)
Webspeak (a browser built specifically for blind users)

and have set up an experiment using volunteers to evaluate these browsers' performance and ease of use. From this I hope to highlight specific problems with the browsers and suggest areas of improvement.

If you want to find out more you can e-mail me.