RefLink: An Interface that Enables People with Motion Impairments to Analyze Web Content and Dynamically Link to References

We present RefLink, an interface that allows users to analyze the content of webpages by dynamically linking to an online encyclopedia such as Wikipedia. Upon opening a webpage, RefLink instantly provides a list of terms extracted from the webpage and annotates each term by the number of its occurrences in the page. RefLink uses the text-to-speech interface to read out the list of terms. The user can select a term of interest and follow its link to the encyclopedia. RefLink thus helps the users to perform an informed and efficient contextual analysis. Initial user testing suggests that RefLink is a valuable web browsing tool, in particular for people with motion impairments, because it simplifies the process of obtaining reference material and performing contextual analysis.National Science Foundation (IIS-0713229