Development and evaluation of Clouds4All interface: A tag clouds reader for visually impaired users

摘要

The presence of folksonomy and related tag clouds in web is an established reality but it not follows the application of universal design principles. For this reason, visual impaired users cannot access in an easy and efficient way to this type of information. From this problem, this paper presents a research on Web accessibility that aims the conceptualization, implementation and evaluation of the Clouds4All tool, an Internet Explorer browser extension that adds a tag clouds reader interface. The results that are presented comprise the second and third research stages, which require, respectively, the development and evaluation of the Clouds4All interface. The interface was developed based on the Javascript programming language and a Portuguese Text-To-Speech (TTS) engine. Regarding the performed tests results, all users who participated in the interface evaluation acknowledged that it is useful and they would be willing to install it on their personal computer.