aIDEAS PVAW Project
Personalised Visual Adaptation of the WWW
- an innovative personalised All Inclusive Solution for accessing the information contained within the stylised WWW pages
The aIDEAS PVAW Web Browser Plug-in demonstrator described on the following pages provides a different approach to enhancing the viewing of web pages.
- For the web user, text can be customised and enhanced to reflect personal needs and preferences.
- For the publisher, the aIDEAS PVAW Web Browser Plug-in provides a significantly cost-reduced means of enhanced web viewing for all site visitors.
The World Wide Web (WWW) has developed as a communications medium, and is often as much about the presentation of the material, as it is about the information content. However increased WWW page styling leads to visual accessibility issues for some individuals.
Some publishers try to provide visual accessibility features as an additional service. An example of this is the text only version of news.bbc.co.uk. However, the options for visual adaptation remain limited to the choices made by the publisher, rather than the individual.
Legislation is beginning to appear in this area. In the UK the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) specifically includes the information published on governmental and educational institution websites. It is estimated that inaccessible web pages will affect around 15% of the UK population (around 8 million people) — with a spending power of GBP 50 billion a year. Companies are now at risk of legal action and accessibility testing is becoming increasingly popular.
We applaud the above initiatives but are also aware that there are additional efforts and costs borne by committed web-publishers. Consequently, a noticeable proportion of all publishers of WWW information do not adhere to these initiatives. The aIDEAS PVAW Web Browser plug-in provides a solution.
Read the Concept of aIDEAS PVAW Web Browser Plug-in.
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