An Accessible System for Personalized News Content

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Volume Title

Helsinki University of Technology | Master's thesis
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Authors

Date

2005

Department

Sähkö- ja tietoliikennetekniikan osasto

Major/Subject

Vuorovaikutteinen digitaalinen media

Mcode

T-111

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

ix + 66 s.+ liitt. 6

Series

Abstract

The World Wide Web as a channel of information is growing increasingly important. While sighted persons usually have no problems in obtaining their flow of daily news events, web pages that were not created with accessibility in mind make it is more of a challenge to visually impaired persons. Also, mobile use is lacking. For many of these persons, the content presentation could easily be improved to serve both them and persons with normal sight. For others, the printed media format is not suitable at all. With help of technologies such as speech synthesis and portable audio players (or even properly equipped mobile phones), these users could be served with audio content in accordance with their preferences. Viewable users also find it relatively easy to scan though news articles, looking for relevant news by looking at the headlines. As the news flow grows further, automatic personalization can help out with the basic scan. Since scanning through news is even harder without sight, visually impaired users could benefit greatly from a news service that is personalized for their needs. This Master's Thesis explores the issues related to creating such a system, and especially focuses on building accessible web interfaces. Some effort is put into making the system suitable for multi-language deployment, and we also discuss the server side technology needed to realize the personalized, accessible web interfaces. An accessible system for providing visually impaired users with news content (of many formats) is developed. The created system is evaluated according to accessibility standard compliance, and since accessibility issues were taken into consideration in the planning, it passes most of them, obtaining WCAG 1.0 Conformance Level Double-A.

Description

Supervisor

Vuorimaa, Petri

Thesis advisor

Södergård, Caj

Keywords

web accessibility, tillgänglighet på webben, internationalization, internationalisering, localization, lokalisering, xhtml, model-view-controller mönstret, css, model-view-controller

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Citation

Permanent link to this item

https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-2020120451505

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[dipl] Teknillinen korkeakoulu / TKK