People often use computers other than their own to access web content, but blind users are restricted to using only computers equipped with expensive, special-purpose screen reading programs that they use to access the web. Web-Anywhere is a web-based, self-voicing web browser that enables blind web users to access the web from almost any computer that can produce sound without installing new software. The system could serve as a convenient, low-cost solution for blind users on-the-go, for blind users unable to afford a full screen reader and for web developers targeting accessible design. This paper overviews existing solutions for mobile web access for blind users and presents the design of the WebAnywhere system. WebAnywhere generates speech remotely and uses prefetching strategies designed to reduce perceived latency. A user evaluation of the system is presented showing that blind users can use Web-Anywhere to complete tasks representative of what users might want to complete on computers that are not their own. A survey of public computer terminals shows that WebAnywhere can run on most.

1. Jeffrey P. Bigham, Craig M. Prince and Richard E. Ladner University of Washington Seattle, Washington, USA webinsight.cs.washington.edu A Screen Reader On-the-Go

3. Price Perspective $349 ~$1000.00 ~$349.00 JAWS Screen Reader New DELL Computer Introduction

10. WebAnywhere Architecture WebAnywhere Client interface in Javascript Speech MP3s retrieved from server Played with Flash or Embedded Players

12. (15 in Seattle, WA) Evaluation

14. User Evaluation Likert Scale from 1 Strongly Disagree to 5 Strongly Agree Evaluation

18. WebAnywhere is Open Source webanywhere.googlecode.com Future Work

22. The End (Coming May 2008) webinsight.cs.washington.edu/webanywhere Our supporters: National Science Foundation Grant IIS-0415273 A Boeing Professorship Benetech Summer Fellowship Thanks to: T.V. Raman, Sangyun Hahn, Lindsay Yazzolino, Jacob O. Wobbrock, Anna A. Cavender, and our user study participants and consultants.