Enabling Blind Web Users to Create Accessible Web Content

Browsing the web is inefficient for blind web users because of persistent accessibility problems. While previous efforts have tried to improve web accessibility through developer awareness, technological improvements, and legislation, these attempts have failed to adequately address accessibility concerns. Blind web users have proven quite adept at overcoming the shortcomings of the web and existing tools, but have been only marginally involved in improving the accessibility of their own web experience. In this paper, we first present a survey of existing accessibility issues and then discuss technology that has been developed to overcome them. We next discuss user studies that have been performed in order to understand the user experience of blind web users. These studies along with related work will inform new remote studies that will observe blind web users as they browse the web using their own equipment. Finally, we propose a new approach to improving web accessibility that leverages the skill and intelligence of blind web users. This approach seeks to enable blind web users to independently improve the accessibility of their own environment in a way that can be shared with both web users and developers.