WEB ACCESSIBILITY TOOL FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED ACTIVATED THROUGH HTML TAGS

Nowadays, there is textual content which is hosted on different websites worldwide, this content can be accessed through any web browser and can be found on different formats, the most popular on Web Sites dedicated to the scientific research area are HTML, PDF and plain text.

This information can be accessed by anyone with minimal computer skills, from any location and at any time, this is the reason why the information repositories have been useful for the development and creation of cutting-edge research from around the world.
The main problem on this research focuses on the fact that this content has very few features that could provide access to people with visual disabilities, which they also have the need to access to information hosted on online websites.

In this sense, the design of a tool will help to facilitate accessibility to such content through audio textual description and its online work will enable its access from any operating system and/or device with Internet access.

For the proper operation of this tool and a best distribution along the internet, it needs the integration of new Internet tags on future versions of HTML, with these new tags the websites will be able to automatically detect when a person with special cognitive abilities requires from a specific tool.

A hard work is required between various entities such as web browsers developers, web servers developers and also websites designers, because when users surf on the Internet, these have to emit some special variables with their web browsers. Therefore, websites will have a method to identify them, through “HTTP_USER_AGENT” variable, which can be parsed to get the value of the special variables and thus deploy on the website special tools depending on what kind of special ability has the user declared on his web browser.

These inclusion tools will only be displayed to people who have this credential enabled in their web browsers. An example is when a custom web site is displayed depending on what kind of operative system is running on your computer and what kind of device visits the web site.

This paper is the first of several publications planned to be performed by the Autonomous University of Sinaloa. The purpose of this research is to make distance education more inclusive.