KAI and accessibility metrics

Abstract

Currently, visually impaired people have problems to access many of the information published on the Internet. Most of the accessibility tools focus on designers or end-users, but few tools consider both at the same time. KAI (Kit for Accessibility to the Internet) considers designers and also users and gives blind people the possibility of having a selective access to the contents of the Internet using WebTouch, an audio/touch browser provided with the kit. KAI relies on a new language called BML (Blind Markup Language) where an element of a web page can be represented only by one tag and one tag can represent only one element. There is a tool in the kit that transforms from HTML to BML and viceversa, so that legacy sites can be accessed. KAI also provides a set of metrics so that a visually impaired user can know the accessibility degree of a web site before surfing. To our knowledge there is no tool providing together all these features. In this paper we give a short overview of KAI, and also list some of the parameters considered to build the metrics for measuring the accessibility degree of a web site from the point of view of visually impaired people.