Interpreting the layout of web pages

Web pages such as news and shopping sites often use modular layouts. When used effectively this practice allows authors to present clearly large amounts of information in a single page. However, while sighted people can visually parse and understand these complex layouts in seconds, current assistive technologies such as screen readers cannot. This puts visually impaired users at a great disadvantage. In order to design better assistive technologies, we conducted a study of how people interpret modular layouts of news and shopping Web pages. The study revealed that when the layout complexity increases, the interpretation process gets longer and the reading gets more varied. Also, before looking at the main content, users first frame the Web page by looking for familiar structural elements that can be used as references and entry points. These elements include navigational bars, search boxes, and ads. This implies that assistive technologies can reduce the time required to frame the pages if they help users identify reference points and entry points

User Interfaces for Personal Knowledge Management with Semantic Technologies

This thesis describes iMapping and QuiKey, two novel user interface concepts for dealing with structured information. iMapping is a visual knowledge mapping technique based on zooming, which combines the advantages of several existing approaches and scales up to very large maps. QuiKey is a text-based tool to interact with graph-structured knowledge bases with very high interaction efficiency. Both tools have been implemented and positively evaluated in user studies

Parsing and interpreting ambiguous structures in spatial hypermedia

When reflecting on information, spatial hypermedia users express their understanding of the information’s structure visually. In order to facilitate this process, spatial hypermedia uses spatial parsers that enable systems to infer the structure of information based on the implicit relationships between components of the representation. This paper describes the two main purposes of spatial parsers in spatial hypermedia systems and how particular parsing approaches and features influence their effectiveness and responsiveness. An alternative approach that provides better support for ambiguity and adaptability is instantiated in FLAPS, an adaptive spatial parser that uses fuzzy-logic in order to infer the implicit structure of spatial hypermedia. The comparison of FLAPS to other parsers reveals benefits of supporting ambiguous structures by computing multiple possible interpretations and identifies limitations that provide goals for future spatial parsers