Webanywhere-Visual

[clayton]

Project Suggestion: A version of Webanywhere for sighted users.

Webanywhere (http://webanywhere.cs.washington.edu/) is a screen reader
freely available on the Web that it can be used with no software
installation. Many people would benefit from a tool based on the same
technology and deployment model that offered a suitable interface for
sighted users (one that allowed the user to select material to be read
on a web page, and that would show a cursor tracing what is being
read.)

Jeff Bigham, the leader of the Webanywhere project, has set up
Webanywhere as an open source project, and is interested in developing
a visual version.

Who in our group would be interested in helping with this? As a very
rough cut, we need (1) some design work, including consultation with
prospective users; (2) some investigation of the technical approach--
Webanywhere traverses the DOM of a page it is handling; we need to
access pieces of the DOM based on mouse clicks, both the control
reading and to place indicators (highlighting, cursor); (3)
programming to make it work. I may have a little student resource for
some of this this summer, and more in the Fall.

Volunteers, comments, and ideas?

[Gregg Vanderheiden]

Count me in.  This is one of the key reasons we set up RtF - to foster extension of access technologies into the cognitive, language, and learning disability space.   And I have great interest in this space.   

BTW - the way to do this is to do general discussion here - but to set up a separate Project Area with its own Project team list - so people can talk hot and heavy on that list without filling everyones email boxes up who is on this list.  That way people who want to follow it closely can sign up over there.      But you can bring the good questions back here for wider discussion. 

I'll set up the Project and project list.  People from this list who want to follow it closely can then sign up on that list as well.    You all can decide which list to do which discussions on - with the above principle in mind. 

Jeff - I'll buzz you to see how you would like the project set up.    Then we will announce here how to sign up for that list if people are interested. 

Gregg

-----------------------

Gregg Vanderheiden Ph.D.

Director Trace R&D Center

Professor Industrial & Systems Engineering

and Biomedical Engineering

University of Wisconsin-Madison