Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Making Wikipedia more accessible to the blind

I just posted the following to Wikipedia:

When you look for results in any search engine you enter keywords into a search box and expect to get answers.
In Wikipedia lot of times users do not get a straight answer. For example, for the word CAT they get a list of cat species to choose from. The same happens whenever the query has more than one meaning. This is an obstacle not only for the blind but also for seeing people. It is a barrier between the query and the answer. It is a clumsy way to find out what the query means.
Using QTSaver (http://qtsaver.com/index_advanced.html) bypasses this obstacle and gives users straight answers. Blind people can use Talking Browsers like Opera to read the results.
QTSaver is free software that extracts multiple large chunks of microcontent from popular search engine sites including Wikipedia. Users can choose to get their results only from Wikipedia.
QTSaver displays a single Search-Engine-Results-Page and skips pictures tables and information that is not answering directly the users' query.
This proposed new software is being used currently in the Center of the Association for the Visually Impaired Students in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and gets positive comments.

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