Interested in learning about the web accessiblity research conducted by the Olin College 2020-2021 SCOPE Team? Click the whitepaper links below to learn about the human-centered design insights and actionable accessibility challenges we identified through interviews with people who are blind. Check out the functional specification links if you'd like to dive deep into some of the project proposals we passed to UT Austin and Microsoft for further development.
How do inaccessible websites affect the lives of people who are blind? This whitepaper contains key insights from our human-centered design process, supported by anecdotes we gathered from real people. Link to whitepaper.
Interested in making the Internet a more accessible place for people who are blind? This whitepaper contains actionable recommendations for web and assistive technology developers. Link to whitepaper.
Basic usability practices tell us that users need to understand how to fill out forms, and how to recover if they make a mistake. Our team discovered that many form errors rely solely on visual cues that don’t inform screen reader users of the problem, and this can have real effects on the lives of people who are blind. In this functional specification, we outline how machine learning could be used to make form error handling screen reader-friendly. Link to specification.
This functional specification outlines a possible method for making pop-ups more accessible for screen reader users who are blind. The dataset that this proposes would help train a machine-learning algorithm to identify when a pop-up has appeared, the type of pop-up, and the exit mechanism for the pop-up. Link to specification.
This functional specification proposes an online shopping experience designed specifically for blind users that capitalizes on the consistent structure of ecommerce sites. The proposed implementation will allow users to dynamically switch between shopping tasks like browsing search results, applying filters, and locating the “My Cart” button. Link to specification.