range of disabilities, we can conclude that an effec-
tive web access method would be useful to many. As
there is no lack of either potential users or demand for
a usable web access system, the fact that it is so rarely
seen in practice may be partially due to the inadequate
efficiency of currently available solutions. In our ex-
perience testing various accessible web browsing sys-
tems, the large number of links and the complex lay-
out in modern web pages makes navigation unaccept-
ably slow and cumbersome.
To address this issue, we propose a new technique
for selecting web page elements for bandwidth lim-
ited input devices. This method will be a key com-
ponent in a customized browser designed to be used
with alternative, low bandwidth input devices. Sec-
tion 2 discusses some of the previous work in this
area, with particular emphasis on the linear scanning
selection method (Section 2.1) for selecting elements
as employed by many previous approaches. The ma-
jor components of our proposed system are detailed
in subsections of Section 3, including specifics of the
implementation.
2 BACKGROUND SURVEY
One of the cornerstones of computer use has always
been, and continues to be entering text into the com-
puter. This has prompted a wealth of work on cre-
ating efficient typing interfaces that can be operated
with a single input signal such as that generated by
an alternative input device. A common approach to
this typing interface has remained relatively constant
from its inception, with letters being selected from a
grid by automatic scanning and typed upon activation
of the input device. The most efficient implemen-
tations use a divide and conquer approach by divid-
ing the available characters into groups and narrowing
down the selection on each switch activation. Com-
monly found in commercial switch scanning prod-
ucts (madentec.com, 2006) is the row-column scan-
ning approach where letters are displayed in a two di-
mensional matrix and scanned through first by row,
and then, upon switch activation, by column until the
desired letter is selected (Steriadis and Constantinou,
2003).
Conversely, the primary method for navigating on
the world wide web has traditionally been by “point
and click”. This method is not easily adaptable to sin-
gle input devices that are not capable of accurate two
dimensional input. One approach to solving this prob-
lem is to use several on-screen buttons to move the
mouse pointer on the screen. For single switch users,
this is usually done by presenting a button for each
direction of mouse movement (x and y, as well as di-
agonal) and then scanning through the buttons. While
this method is a valuable fallback for applications that
are not accessible via the keyboard, it is not an ef-
ficient interface for continuous use, and requires pre-
cise timing control in switch activations from the user.
The inefficiency of these pointer control schemes has
prompted research into other ways to navigate on the
world wide web.
There are two notable attempts at creating a web
browser specifically accessible to single switch users,
the AVANTI browser (Stephanidis et al., 1997) and
the MultiWeb browser (Owens and Keller, 2000).
Both of these approaches use a linear scanning ap-
proach to link selection, with some differences in how
the link scanning is presented to the user. In addition,
(Mankoff et al., 2002) developed a web browser ac-
cessible to users capable of operating four separate
switches using a similar linear scanning approach,
with focus being advanced by switch activation in-
stead of automatically on a timeout. The linear scan-
ning technique is discussed more thoroughly in Sec-
tion 2.1. Hanson et al. with their accessibilityWorks
project, while focusing more on adapting the appear-
ance of web pages, also consider the issue of con-
trol by devices with zero or one dimensional input
(Hanson et al., 2005). Similar to other work in the
area, they propose to extract the list of links and place
them in an external list such that they can be selected
by a user incapable of two dimensional cursor con-
trol. The Gnome On Screen Keyboard (gok.ca, 2006)
implements a similar link extraction scheme for web
browsers that can expose web page structure to an ac-
cessibility framework (Zhao et al., 2005).
In more mainstream web browsers, two alternate
approaches to linearly iterating through links on a
web page have emerged: incremental search and au-
tomatic access keys. Mozilla Firefox implements a
feature called “find as you type”, which incremen-
tally searches a web page and can highlight match-
ing links as one types a search query (mozilla.org,
2006a). If only one link matches a search, it can be
navigated to by pressing the “enter” button on the key-
board. This allows the user to select text and image
links, but does not allow focusing of text entry boxes,
clicking of form buttons, or selecting other form input
fields. Another approach is automatic access keys, as
implemented in the Konqueror (konqueror.org, 2006)
web browser on the Linux platform. The automatic
access keys approach assigns a unique alphanumeric
character to each selectable element on a web page,
and shows these characters with a tooltip over each
element. Typing an assigned letter will select the cor-
responding element. Currently, the system only as-
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