Towel: Experiences of Augmenting the Web with Journey Knowledge
Proceedings of the The Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference, New York, USA, ACM Press, (May 2003)Abstract
Movement, or mobility, is key to the accessibility, design, and usability of many websites. While some peripheral mobility issues have been addressed few have centred on the mobility problems of visually impaired users. We use our past work to address these issues and derive mobility heuristics from mobility models, use these heuristics to place mobility objects within a web page, and describe the construction of a prototype mobility instrument, in the form of a Netscape plug-in, to process these objects. Specifically, we likened web use to travelling in a virtual space, compared it to travelling in a physical space, and introduced the idea of mobility - the ease of travel - as opposed to travel opportunity. Our hypothesis is that travel and mobility within the web mirrors travel and mobility within real-world environments. We suggest that the Web community has typically concentrated on navigation and / or orientation rather than the whole travel experience, and that this neglect is crucial when dealing with browsing by visually impaired users. We therefore extend the definition of travel to mean: confident navigation and orientation with purpose, ease and accuracy within an environment.
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