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Making Twitter accessible for the blind: Accessible Social Networking

Making Twitter accessible for the blind: Accessible Social Networking Team Members Overview Keyword List Running this application Challenges Advantages Future Work Links References Team Members Nishit Chokhawala([email protected]) Nikhil Mohan([email protected]) Ranjanabh Bahukhandi([email protected]) Vinay Tambve([email protected]) Mentor: Brian D'souza([email protected]) Overview The aim of this project is to make the Twitter Social Networking site accessible to the disabled and more so for the blind community. The project is being developed as part of the Project Possibility SS12 Endeavor.

Google has already come out with an excellent API called the AxsJAX. So instead of reinventing the wheel, we decided to make use of this API which proved to be a very rewarding and pleasurable experience. Of course, we also needed other tools such as greasemonkey(script injector) and FireVox(TTS Engine). So using keyboard strokes, a blind person is able to have a pleasant experience while using Twitter.

Keyword List While making a project such as this, you want to make sure that the end-user has minimum clicks to be made for a complete user expereince. Hence, adding keyboard shortcuts to perform certain activities is of essence. Some of the important keywords we ended up using for navigating through the navigation page were as follows:

As and when more features are added to this application, the keyword list shown here is expected to be expanded.

Keyword (from keyboard) Action Initiated up/down Navigate through the tweets Ctrl + Alt + 1 Focus on the tweet box Ctrl + Alt + 2 Post a tweet from the tweet box Ctrl + Alt + 3 Get my followers Ctrl + Alt + 4 List of Following Ctrl + Alt + 5 Go to home page Ctrl + Alt + 0 Sign Out Alt + Shift + '+' Find People/Add Friends Alt + Shift + 's' Settings Page Alt + Shift + 'l' Sign Out Alt + Shift + 'p' Go to profile page ? Help Menu e Go to list of Trending Topics r Reply to a tweet t For re-tweet d Delete tweets w For going through the list of tweets on home page Running this application Right now there are two ways in which you can run our application:

1. Downloading the zip package of the firefox twitter application that is located here
2. Making sure that you have the following tools added to a sand-boxed version of firefox: ->a. Greasemonkey for adding scripts to firefox

->b. Fire Vox TTS Enginer

Please visit http://google-axsjax.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/docs/tutorial/tutorial.html#sec-1 for more details

Challenges Learning the new technologies such as AxsJAX, CNR, etc. Trying to focus on the usability criteria by thinking from a blind person's perspective. Pair Programming Advantages Twitter is a highly popular social networking and micro-blogging service. It is also a very good source of information on trending topics and other news. Hence, it is an important tool for many people. So our service right now allows a user to login into twitter using his credentials from his keyboard. Once that is done, he has only to use the keywords to access the other features such as reading tweets, viewing followers, getting to know trending topics.

Future Work There is a lot of possible future work for this project. Since twitter offers a lot number of facilities, given the time and the learning curve needed in assimilating this new technology, we were not able to implement each and every aspect associated to Twitter. So we plan to add additional features in the future. Also twitter should come out with a better JavaScript API in some time. Using API calls should certainly make the entire process of communicating and getting information easier.

Links Project Home References Google's tutorial on writing AxsJAX scripts : Here AxsJAX source code repository : Here XPath Tutorials: http://www.zvon.org/xxl/XPathTutorial/General/examples.html http://www.w3schools.com/Xpath/ Javascript Tutorials: http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp http://www.webteacher.com/javascript/ch03.html http://www.wdvl.com/Authoring/JavaScript/Tutorial/

NOTE: This Wiki page is subject to change as and when new features are implemented.