3D HapticWebBrowser: Towards Universal Web Navigation for the Visually Impaired

When viewed at a macroscopic scale, an interesting emergent property of the Web is that it constantly evolves towards being the most important entry point for information production and consumption by everyone. This purpose is defeated right if a single user with a disability cannot access a given piece of information on the Web. However, information on the Web is graphically-orientated and in most cases visually impaired users have very restricted access and find it difficult to recognize this kind of visual representation.For visually impaired people and especially for blind users alternative information presentation ways must be found, which would replace visual information. 3D HapticWebBrowser, is a free open source web browser to address the problems of visually impaired in accessing the Web. Issues of multimodal interaction and haptic technologies enable universal navigation of web pages and efficient map exploration of preferable 2D maps. Categories and Subject Descriptors K4.2 [Social Issues]: Assistive technologies for persons wit