Technology is bridging the gap between people: A case study of visually impaired users

摘要

SWANS (Semantic Web Accessibility Network Services) is a research project which addresses issues related to the immobility of people who are visually impaired (VI's).Its aim is to resolve their issues by deploying Semantic Web Services (SWS). This paper presents the results of a study to examine that technology is bridging the people together or creating a gap among the VI's community. This study was completed with the collaboration of Cambridge Online Pathways project. The author used direct observations, open-ended interviews, participant observations and physical artifacts as sources of evidence to collect data. In order to make the data more reliable a multiple-case study approach was employed. Therefore, our study group consisted of fifteen visually impaired people. In this group four were blind and the remaining eleven had low vision. All participants were eighteen years old or above While in the EU, only 3 per cent out of 436 websites has achieved Level A conformance passing the full suite of both automated and manual checks, 10 per cent achieved Limited Pass Level A, 17 per cent of sites got Marginal Fail Level A and finally, the remaining 70% of sites showed as Fail Level A. Therefore no site that achieved Level A conformance was found to achieve the higher standard of Level Double-A of WCAG 1.0 [3]. It is a reasonable deduction that VI's are facing big difficulties when interacting with WWW or Internet.