CSC490 P2 Idea Proposal

After analyzing the different approaches to web accessibility for the visually impaired, I found that the approaches boil down to three types: screen magnifiers, screen readers, and text browsers. Each approach presents its own set of problems. Screen magnifiers tend to provide user unfriendly interfaces, i.e. size of menu is too small, screen readers are too specific, and text browsers don’t always preserve a website’s layout. However, each approach does present a viable solution. The key features I’d like to focus on are the simplification from text browsers and the enhancement from the screen magnifiers.



My proposal is a Firefox add-on that allows users to choose what they want to see and enhance it the way they want to see it. The add-on divides areas of the webpage with transparent red borders. Each of these areas can be dragged into the canvas.
In the first picture, we see an example of the divided areas of the webpage. The blank white space is the empty canvas. In the second picture, we see the user dragging a chosen section of the page and placing it into the canvas.


In the canvas, there are four buttons. One changes the foreground colour, the other changes the background colour, and the remaining two respective buttons zoom in or zoom out of the canvas.

The motivation behind the idea was to simplify the content of a webpage to what a user would like to see. Although there are existing scripts to simplify the layout of a webpage, the end result is never consistent. This also causes a large issue when dealing with unwanted content such as sidebar adds. In the webpage optimizers I have evaluated, none of them managed to get rid of the ads.