[CEUD-ICT] Screen readers and Alternative content "views"

[Barry McMullin]

On Tue, 3 Feb 2009, Joshue O Connor wrote:

> I changed the thread title to make it more relevant.
>
> Dónal Fitzpatrick wrote:
>> Various methods have been tried to provide either automatic summaries of
>> pages or indeed to provide alternative "views" of the pages.  The work of
>> Mary Zajicek at Oxford Brookes in the late 90s is an interesting example of
>> summarisation of pages. [...]
>
>> I would definitely recommend looking
>> at the work of Esmond Walshe which was carried out at DCU a few years ago.
>> Built on top of Emacs, this research enabled very very rapid navigation and
>> exploration of pages.
>
> Esmond would you like to share a little more about your work?

I believe Esmond is subscribed to the list, but I'm not sure how
actively he monitors it. So, on his behalf (as I was his PhD
supervisor at the time) I can refer you to this paper:

<http://eaccess.rince.ie/white-papers/2004/icchp-2004/icchp-2004.html>

which gives a short summary of his work. His full thesis was
completed in the Summer of 2006, but has not, unfortunately, been
properly prepared for online publication at this point (we have a
backlog of these at the moment).  However, just for the select
members of this list (!) I have made available a "raw" HTML
version here:

<http://eaccess.rince.ie/theses/esmond.walshe/>

or, for those with such proclivities, a PDF version here:

<http://eaccess.rince.ie/theses/esmond.walshe/>

Note: I do note pretend that either of these measures up to our
own standards for properly "accessible" publication.  I would say
that they are not "bad", and certainly better than is typical;
but still have some definite rough edges, particularly around the
presentation of the (small number of) embedded images.  So "let
the reader beware". (This also incidentally serve as an example
of the use of the LaTeX toolset I mentioned yesterday - both HTML
and PDF publication formats are automatically generated from a
LaTeX+BiBTex "single source master", with all structuring and
internal cross-referencing automatically generated...)

Enjoy,

- Barry.


--
Barry McMullin, Dublin City University
   phone: +353-1-700-5432
   web: http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~mcmullin/