Prof Finds Program
To Adapt Web For All

By Carla M. Collado
Staff Writer

For most people, using the Internet is a simple process — point and click.

But for people with vision impairments and other disabilities, reading, let alone surfing the Web, can be exhausting.

To help, Professor Wayne Dick, chair of the computer engineering and computer sciences department at California State University, Long Beach, is introducing IBM’s WebAdapt2Me software to students, faculty and staff on campus. Dick, who’s partial-sighted and grew up reading books through a magnifying glass, has seen the benefits of this new software.

“I always wanted to read,” he said. “I was a scholar, and it was always painful and difficult. Now, I can do a lot of reading in comfort.”

WebAdapt2Me allows users to alter the settings of a webpage and view it in a way that’s most effective for them. Some of the features include changing the size of text, the colors and contrast of the page, the spacing between words and letters, and reducing the amount of clutter by compressing everything to one column. The software’s keyboard and mouse features also detect typing and clicking errors and automatically adjust to the person’s style.

“The idea is that no two people are essentially identical,” said Vicki Hanson, who helped develop the software and is manager of accessibility research at IBM. “People can pick and choose what works for them.”

Hanson started working on it about three years ago, after the IBM Community Relations program found that seniors were having trouble using the Internet.

“We forget, those of us who use the Web all the time, that having three columns of info can be complicated,” she said.

Some of the first features IBM developed were text enlargement, color changes and one that allows WebAdapt2Me to read the text on the screen out loud.

Meanwhile, Dick had spent years struggling with his own vision impairment. He said he managed to read books using a magnifying glass, hunched over. But even so, he didn’t actually finish an entire book until the age of 20.

He got through his college years with the help of a state-run reader program, where someone would come and read his textbooks to him. Once he began teaching, Xeroxing enlarged copies of book pages made it easier for him to answer students’ questions during class, since he could read along with them.

“The problem is that paper is rigid, it can’t be changed,” he said, “But computer images can be shifted and morphed.”

Dick said that in 2004, he read a paper Hanson had written about the new WebAdapt2Me software, and decided to try the program. By the end of the year, he and Hanson were working on plans to bring it to CSULB.

For the past four months, they’ve been testing the software on a group of 10 people on campus made up of students, faculty, and staff with a range of disabilities. Dick meets with them regularly and logs the feedback they provide in their weekly reports.

He said people with more serious disabilities enjoy WebAdapt2Me more, most likely because they have a higher need for it. The people with milder disabilities feel it takes too much effort to learn the software on top of the other reading methods they already use, he added.

Nonetheless, Dick said reactions have been mostly positive, and that he hopes to make the software available to the rest of the university by the next school year.

“Once we’ve identified who it works for, and what tasks it works well for, we’re simply going to announce it around campus,” he said.

According to Ben Kempner, program director of IBM’s Worldwide Accessibility Center, WebAdapt2Me is already being tested with several organizations such as SeniorNet, and with schools that have children with learning disabilities.

“Seniors are much less intimidated by the Internet because this technology has helped simplify the way information is presented to them,” Kempner said.

Dick agrees, saying that older people with disabilities now will be able to use the Internet to do everyday activities they normally have trouble with, such as shopping.

“WebAdapt2Me is one of the ways of spreading who the Web was intended for,” he said, “World Wide Web meant worldwide, for anyone in the world who needs it.”

Currently, WebAdapt2Me is only sold to certain universities and organizations that install it on their servers, Kempner said. As long as a person is logged onto one of those servers, they can use it for free and save their individual settings.

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