Making multimedia internet content accessible and usable

Abstract

Although multimedia content containing streaming media is now widely used on the World Wide Web, there exist considerable difficulties for blind users to access such content, due to its dynamic changes, keyboard inoperability, and audio interference with the speech from assistive software. In particular, the third problem of audio interference is serious for blind users, since multimedia content often contains streaming media such as video and music which continuously play sounds, and thus they cannot hear the speech, which is masked by the loud media.

In this paper, we propose a new accessible browser that can directly manipulate such multimedia content. In order to control Flash contents, our browser relies on a transcoding HTTP proxy to inject special scripts into the Flash content and then manipulates the embedded streaming media and sound objects via the injected scripts. By using our browser, users can easily turn the volume up or down, play, stop, or pause the streaming media with shortcut keys. Since the users do not need to focus on buttons or sliders for these operations, they can immediately stop or fade out the intrusive media when listening to speech from assistive software.