Development of a Semantic Web Framework for the Blind

This research addresses some of the important issues related to web accessibility in the context of blind users. The problems of Web data accessibility and navigation for blind users have become an active research field for the past decade. Many techniques have been created to solve them, some are hardware-based and others are software based. Yet, the web is rapidly evolving toward the far-anticipated Semantic Web (SW): a revolutionary vision extending Web information with well-defined meaning so that it becomes more easily accessible by human users and automated processes. As a result, SW technological breakthroughs such as ontologies and semantic data description, as well as data representation and manipulation technologies (i.e RDF, OWL, and SPARQL) are being recently explored to improve data accessibility for blind Web surfers. This research, briefly explores existing studies targeting Web data accessibility for blind users ranging from traditional techniques (Braille output, screen readers, etc.) to semantically enhanced techniques (using Speech and alternative speech-based interfaces for human-computer interaction). A semantic web for the blind was designed and implemented using JAVASCRIPT, HTML, CSS, and MySQL. After the evaluation of the developed framework, the result of the research revealed that it has load-time as 75%, success ratio of 0.93, repository size of 65%, and CPU-time up to 80% and comparing it to the existing performance evaluation, it can be said that the proposed developed framework out performed