Accessibility mashups: AxsJAX fun with XKCD Comics
Posted by T.V. Raman, Research
Scientist
From time to time, our own
shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a
technologist who cannot see — tips that sighted people, among
others, may also find useful.
Earlier this year, I blogged about the potential presented by
href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/web-apis-web-mashups-and-accessibility.html" href="http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/11/introducing-axsjax-access-enabling-ajax.html"
>accessibility mashups
delivering web interfaces that are optimized to a user's
special needs. More recently, my office-mate Charles Chen and I
blogged about our work on
>AxsJAX
for injecting accessibility enhancements into web
applications.
As we head into the holiday season, we decided it was time to have
some fun and generate a few laughs based on what we've worked
on during the year. As chance would have it,
Munroe, the creator of the
>XKCD comic strip, visited our Mountain View
campus to give an
com="" v="zJOS0sV2a24" >extremely entertaining talk. He even
made a reference to blind hacker geeks! So the temptation
was too hard to resist. We had to speech-enable his comic
strip.
The XKCD comics are highly visual, with a short comment from the
author accompanying many of the episodes. Having a detailed written
description that is visible to everyone would spoil the comic for
the average user; part of the fun is to understand the jokes purely
from the sketches. At the same time, notice that indexing and
searching online comics runs into the same challenge that blind
users face: to be able to locate past episodes, one needs access to
textual transcripts that capture the essence of each sketch. To
help with the latter, fans of online comics like XKCD have created
a
devoted to indexing comic strips, replete with full text
transcriptions. This is an example of a social Web applications
where fans can transcribe their favorite comics including
XKCD.
In the Web 1.0 world, I would have to pull up an XKCD episode, then
go to the site containing the transcripts, and finally find the
associated transcript in order to make sense of the comic. But this
is exactly where Web 2.0 mashups excel; mashups are all about
bringing data from multiple Web sources into a single integrated
view. Once we realized this, we were able to AxsJAX the XKCD site
with a small amount of code. Now, I can browse to the XKCD comic
site, and listen to each episode — with the underlying
AxsJAX-based mashup taking care of the minutiae of retrieving the
relevant transcript and integrating it into the comic strip.
This approach leverages all that is powerful about web-based
applications:
Distributed accessibility — the XKCD author does not need to
create the transcripts.
Transcripts can be integrated from across the web.
The accessibility enhancements do not spoil the fun for XKCD
readers in general.
And with Open Source self-voicing plugins like
href="http://firevox.clcworld.net/" >Fire Vox
every XKCD user can listen to the strip when desired.
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