Access For Blind Users In E-Business Applications Through Voice Accessible Browser: A Semantic Web Approach

The advent of the World Wide Web (WWW) has caused a dramatic evolution in information accessibility. Although the web has become an electronic gateway to seemingly infinite amounts of information worldwide, yet it remains to be a complex issue for the blind users to access this information. A majority of websites are inundated by contents, both non-visual (audio) and visual (video & text). Accessibility measures in terms of a usable and blind-friendly website should be made available to the blind users. This study includes the analysis of the existing speech technologies and screen readers; identification of the issues faced and the practical needs of blind users to access the web easily and emphasizing the web developers to follow the guidelines (WCAG 2.0) defined by W3C. The Speech Technology has been underdevelopment since 1950s and still struggling to provide a reliable scope of an alternative input method for computers. Most of the web contents on internet do not meet the web accessibility guidelines defined by the authorities and hence speech software applications that are used to provide accessibility for disabled, particular blind users, still struggle to meet the practical needs of the users. Several efforts have been made on speech/voice enabled navigations, but to use the Voice Enabled Systems more effectively, we need to exploit the marvels of semantic web properly, especially with the aspect of blind users. Screen Readers have been proposed as one of the answer to this issue but it also has its limitations due to the intense use of visual contents on web pages. So an alternative approach in the form of voice browsing has been proposed which establishes itself to be far better preposition than screen readers.Voice enabled applications have already been introduced but "Voice Enabled Browsing" is an area yet to be discovered. This study focused on the use of voice browsing for disabled; with special emphasis on blinds. To enhance the accessibility using speech, a computer based solution "VAB (Voice Accessible Browser)" is introduced using Microsoft's speech software development Kit (SSDK 5.1). The user can use natural (or close to natural) voice commands to interact with the web through the browser. The speech technology has indeed progressed significantly but unfortunately, the voice recognition is still not smart enough to accept a whole list of commands. So a new routine is developed to access the web content on a webpage, supported by numeric hotlist (hierarchal set of voice commands where the user can listen the commands in numeric form) and browsing shortcuts (which provides the skip option and shift to the desired info directly). Search option is also provided to access any content at any stage during the speech output. The study also includes a semantic web annotation model to support the description of the web content more expediently and also assists to integrate the IT/web techniques with the Information Management applications which opens a whole new window of opportunities, exclusively for blind users.The study also comprises of an empirical investigation of blind user's preference towards the web content and based on these preferences proposes an idea of giving the blind users an opportunity to become a participant to the web. A particular area that can be improved on is the e-Business segment for blind users. Easily-accessible, e-Business platforms could further promote entrepreneurship practices through the development of blind-friendly features such as voice. A global expansion in e-business volume will open new opportunities for the blind to become a part of e-business; either as a consumer or as an entrepreneur. Current study also investigated the existing difficulties to access the web-content (such as inconsistent webpage structure, incompetent voice recognition engines and the use of long sentences as commands, etc) and suggested a different (numeric hotlist, browsing shortcuts) approach, in order to make the web more easily accessible, with special emphasis on blinds. It has also been considered the limitations of the existing web and examined the ways to extract the information from "web pages" containing large amount of visual content. Hence, the main impetus behind this effort is to enhance the accessibility of existing web by exploring new possibilities to make it more easily accessible through voice; exclusively for blind users. On the other hand, keeping voice browsing approach in mind, the study constructed a blind-oriented business application model under the lens of corporate social responsibility, which will support the enterprises to provide better access to business goals while fulfilling its social responsibility towards the society.Overall, this study is an attempt to enhance the web accessibility through speech within existing SSDK capabilities. Technically, it provides more challenges for the research community; (a) To improve the speech technology, (b) to introduce new ways to build comprehensive accessibility solutions for blind users using speech technology, (c) to use semantic web techniques to provide the access of web more expediently, (d) to find new ways of integration of web techniques with information management applications, and (e) to take action as a corporation and contribute our portion as our social responsibility to the society.