Gist Summaries for Visually Impaired Surfers
By Harper, Simon; Patel, Neha; ASSETS 2005 - The Seventh International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, pp. 90-97Publication Date: October 9-12, 2005
Research paper on the development of a FireFox-based tool which creates an “on-the-fly” summary of a Web page for the visually impaired. The tool, called Summate, is a client-side system to automatically and dynamically annotate Web pages with a small summary within a modal “alert box” to assist the user in the decision of whether to read the page. The Summate application aims to enable users to generate a fast short summary to assist them in informed traversal of the non-linear environment. It is a FireFox extension which overlays the FireFox Tool menu and enables summaries to be created and displayed in a pop-up which relies on FireFox and associated screen-reading tehnologies to be able to communicate. Informal evaluations of the application were done by presenting a Summate-created summary and a summary created by a conventional summariser to 6 sighted volunteer testers. Results showed that users generally preferred Summate summaries to conventionally generated ones, as they understood the Summate gist faster. Implications for further development of the tool are discussed.
Published by: Association for Computing Machinery (Website:http://www.acm.org)
SIGACCESS (ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing) (Web Site: http://www.sigaccess.org )
