Widget classification with applications to web accessibility

Once simple and static, many web pages have now evolved into complex web applications. Hundreds of web development libraries are providing ready-to-use dynamic widgets, which can be further customized to fit the needs of individual web application. With such wide selection of widgets and a lack of standardization, dynamic widgets have proven to be an insurmountable problem for blind users who rely on screen readers to make web pages accessible. Screen readers generally do not recognize widgets that dynamically appear on the screen; as a result, blind users either cannot benefit from the convenience of using widgets (e.g., a date picker) or get stuck on inaccessible content (e.g., alert windows). In this paper, we propose a general approach to identifying or classifying dynamic widgets with the purpose of “reverse engineering” web applications and improving their accessibility. To demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, we report on the experiments that show how very popular dynamic widgets such as date picker, popup menu, suggestion list, and alert window can be effectively and accurately recognized in live web applications.