A novel adaptive web-based environment to help deafblind individuals in accessing the web and lifelong learning

Abstract

Deafblindness is a combination of hearing and sight impairment that affects how a person accesses information and communicates with others. This paper presents the design, implementation, and validation of a creative adaptive web-based environment to support deafblind individuals in their web accessibility and life-long learning processes. This system adapts to deafblind users’ degree of loss of senses. It retrieves the web page content using dumbing of DOM (Document Object Model) technique and converts the retrieved content into an appropriate format. If the user can hear, the text is transformed into speech. If they have some sight sense, the content is transformed to screen-based Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) presentation technique. However, if the user has an entirely dual sensory loss, the web page content is transformed into a tactile presentation technique (Moon code or Braille) that can be printed with a special embosser printer on swelled paper or touched using a display device. In the tests performed to deafblind users, this system obtained about 85% user satisfaction. This novel adaptable system that has been tested with users offers the benefit of easing at least some of the daily challenges faced by these individuals and of aiding them in web accessibility and lifelong learning content.