TrailBlazer: Enabling Blind Users to Blaze Trails Through the Web

Comments

Patrick

Summary

TrailBlazer: Enabling Blind Users to Blaze Trails Through the Web, by Bigham, Lau, and Nichols, details a new way for blind users of computers to navigate the web more quickly. Current accessibility programs for the blind consist of only a linear listing of all the text and options on the screen, whether it is listed through voice or through a refreshable Braille display. Trailblazer allows the user to access scripts written for the website (a script consists of a possible path in the website, and websites with scripts written will include the most important and popular actions on the website) and easily jump to the options they need, significantly reducing the time it takes to navigate a website. Scripts that are already written for websites are listed in a large database called "CoScriptor", but Trailblazer also allows users to create their own scripts. These scripts are a kind of instruction for the system, detailing actions the user wants to make on the website in a pseudocode language. Each time a new user creates a script, that script is added to the CoScriptor database, so as users use TrailBlazer, the database continues to grow and more websites are accessible by the blind.

Additionally, the system saves past user's actions and uses them to predict the next most likely action (picks the script most likely to be used). In this way, the system continues to improve with each time the system is used. After doing an extensive user study with blind users, all of the users said that TrailBlazer significantly reduced the amount of time that it took to navigate a website, but were not as happy with the steep learning curve that they had to overcome to use the software. Another problem with TrailBlazer was its inability to navigate dynamic web content such as Flash. As most of that content is not textual, and is contained in its own application, then it cannot navigate buttons, etc. But in general, most of the users were very happy with the interface.

Discussion

I thought that if this technology made it into all of the current web browsers, and it was accessible to all blind users, then it would be super successful. I can't imagine how long and frustrating it is to do even the most simple task as checking your email when you're blind. So, having a system that records the actions you do most often and predicts (with 75% accuracy) the action that you want to do, then you could check email, etc. much faster. The main problem would be whenever you want to go to a new website, or navigate a flash interface, and the system works much more slowly (or not at all, in the case of the flash interface).