WebInsight Making Web Images Accessible October 9, 2007

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Google Tech Talks
February 2, 2007

ABSTRACT

Abstract

Images without alternative text are a barrier to equal web access for blind users. To illustrate the problem, we present a series of studies that conclusively show that a large fraction of significant images have no alternative text. To ameliorate this problem, we developed WebInSight, a system that automatically creates and inserts alternative text into web pages on-the-fly. To formulate alternative text for images, we present three labeling modules based on web context analysis, enhanced optical character recognition (OCR) and human labeling. The system caches alternative text in a local database and can add new labels seamlessly after a...