Re-Presenting Text in a Website for Visually Impaired Users using Braille Line

As new web technologies emerging and being adopted in the design of a website,
web accessibility has become a major issue especially for people with disabilities
.Limitation of assistive technology to render webpage has also been contributing
factor for poor web accessibility by the visually impaired users. This issue has
caused visually impaired users loss semantic information of webpage besides
creating frustration situation of web browsing. In this paper, factors that cause web
browsing frustration to the visually impaired users and types of tactile effects that
can be implemented in the Braille Line device to render the semantic information of
webpage are explored. The main objectives of this project is to build a website reader
and program a Braille Line 20 cell device for web browsing focusing on presenting
non visual text elements such as font attributes and text hierarchy that can be critical
to meaning of the text. Tactile technology have been chosen to be adopted in the
Braille Line as the touch is the most active sense of visually-impaired people to
acquire knowledge .From the prototype to be build, a sample group of visually
impaired users will be taken to test and evaluate the website and the device in terms
of technology as well as its effectiveness. The results and recommendations were
shared by the end of the project as a key milestone for future renditions of the
project.