Presentation (En) - SvenFrankson/JarvisBook GitHub Wiki
#JarvisBook ##Spoken interface for Facebook
##Context
###Web Accessibility
Web accessibility clusters all issues faced by some categories of users when trying to browse a website. While web accessibility was at first mostly focused on visually impaired people, it's now a wider topic, including the need to put web ressources available for people with low skill when it comes to using a computer, or browsing web from non-desktop device (tablet, phone...).
World Wide Web Consortium set guidelines which are to be followed when developing a website to make it accessible, the Web Content Accessbility Guidelines (last updated in 2008), along with metrics associated to theese guidelines, evaluating some website's accessibility.
Most of theese accessbility guidelines are a stronger way of expressing "good coding practice". Hence, we see a strong correlation between a website's accessibility and its source code quality.
###Facebook case
There's no need in introducing Facebook, famous social network claiming more than 1 bilion users.
Since its public opening in 2006, the issue of Facebook's accessibility for visually impaired people has been raised several times.
In particular, the study lead by Rakesh Babu from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (1) is to be noticed, study in which several visually impaired users where requested to accomplish various tasks on the social network. His study conclued that while Facebook is indeed "accessible" for some users with very strong skill when it comes to web browsing with screen reader, the learning curve is tougher than for the majority of websites, thus discouraging most of the less experimented users.
Also according to Rakesh Babu's study, the main gap encountered by visually impaired users would be the profusion of informations displayed simultaneously on screen, making one page structure more complex to memorize, then lowering browsing speed. Another issue would be the quantity of dynamic elements in the interface.
Yet, this study does not take into account the accessibilty of Facebook mobile-app, which is now widely used by visually impaired people. Thank to its more sober design, and the latest pushes in mobile accessibilty, Facebook mobile-app is far more accessible than its desktop version.
##A spoken interface
###Description
The main idea in this project is to make the interface more tree-shaped.
Indeed, following discussions with the team behind www.sport-handicap-aquitaine.org , which has had some deep though about web accessibility, an interface offering more pages, with fewer choices on each of theeses pages is more accessible than one offering lots of choices on few pages. Obviously, this conclusion can only be true if the pages are linked to each others in well designed categories.
Facebook main page allow a user to access a great number of fonctionalities. JarvisBook should then order theese fonctionalities in tree-shaped categories.
However, it should be noticed that while a tree-shaped interface might be easier to use for new users, the fact it has to be runned through to get from top to bottom can make browsing slower for an experiment user needing to go to a known location in the application. Hence, a second guideline in the project would be to add as many shortcuts as possible, allowing advanced users to go straight to a queried location.
Last, JarvisBook aims at giving a new interface for Facebook, without deleting the existing one. JarvisBook will allow the user to browse the website easily, without hiding the existing one, then allowing user to take back full control on classic interface if needed.
###Technical means
Current prototype is developped in C#. .NET framework offers a fairly good speech syntesis through the System.Speech.Synthesis library, and an acceptable way for getting DOM with System.Windows.Forms library.
While it has been enough for a showable prototype, it's obviously not the right way to reech our expectations. Indeed, as it fully relies on Facebook front-end source code, it's hardly maintenable.
Current work focuses on finding more elegant ways of implementing the solution, using Facebook API could be a good option.
###Human means
GIHP Aquitaine, where I'm currently serving as civilian volunteer, is strong of 30 years of experience in working in the field of physical disability, especially concerning visual impairment.
GIHP has a departement dedicated to accessibility tools (Epatech (2)), ergotherapists specialised in training for using theese tools, and more generally a wide base of potential users from any level of skill using computers, whom testimonies have already been very useful for this project.