Accessible images (AIMS): a model to build self-describing images for assisting screen reader users

摘要

Non-visual web access depends on the textual description of various non-text elements of web pages. The existing methods of describing images for non-visual access do not provide a strong coupling between described images and their description. If an image is reused multiple times either in a single Web site or across multiple times, it is required to keep the description at all instances. This paper presents a tightly coupled model termed accessible images (AIMS) which utilizes a steganography-based approach to embed the description in the images at the server side and updating alt text of the web pages with the description extracted with the help of a browser extension. The proposed AIMS model has been built, targeting toward a web image description ecosystem in which images evolve into a self-description phase. The primary advantage of the proposed AIMS model is the elimination of the redundant description of an image resource at multiple instances. The experiments conducted on a dataset confirm that the AIMS model is capable of embedding and extracting descriptions with an accuracy level of 99.6.