AxsJAX - Enhanced Wikipedia User Guide

Table of Contents

  1. What is AxsJAX Enhanced Wikipedia

  2. What are the new features

  3. How to start using the AxsJAX enhanced wikipedia

  4. Future work

1. What is AxsJAX Enhanced Wikipedia

AxsJAX is a Google project for injecting accessibility enhancements as defined by W3C ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications). AxsJAX Enhanced Wikipedia is the wikipedia with some accessibility enhancements using AxsJAX. The enhancements can be divided into two parts

However, most of the help keys provide similar functionality in both cases. 

2. What are the new features

The first set of enhancements are for language selection. They get activated when the user is on the http://www.wikipedia.org web site. The following key functions are available.

?

 to listen to key shortcuts available

esc

 to go to audio language selection

/

  to exit the audio language selection and put focus back on search box

n

 to go to next language while in audio selection

p

 to go to previous language while in audio selection

enter

 to select a particular language while in audio language selection

The second set of enhancements are for navigation of the search contents. These are activated when the user is on the http://en.wikipedia.org web site. The following key functions are available

?

 to listen to key shortcuts available

/

 to direct focus on the search box. Anything the user enters after this is considered search text

esc

 to leave the search box

g

 to go to the table of contents (TOC)

n

 to go to next item while reading the TOC or to the next paragraph while reading the paragraphs or the citations.

p

 to go to the previous item while reading the TOC or to the previous paragraph while reading the paragraphs or the citations.
r  to read out the number of links and citations in the current paragraph.
t  to start reading the citations in the paragraph. To move to next citation, the user has to press t again. When the current citation is read out, the user can press enter to open a new page that is the reference of the citation just read out.

enter

 to start reading the paragraphs in a particular section of the document  while reading the TOC or to open a new page while reading the citations (the new page is the reference of the citation).

While on the http://en.wikipedia.org web site, the user can be in one of the three states

  1. Reading the paragraphs on the page (default mode). In this case the navigation is using the n and p keys. In this state, user can use the g key to go to the table to contents (TOC) or the / key to go to the search box.

  2. Reading the citations in a particular paragraph. This state is reached by pressing t when reading a paragraph. To move to next citation press t again. Use n and p keys to go back to reading the paragraphs or the g key to go back to reading the table of contents.

  3. Reading the table of contents. In this case, the navigation is using the n and p keys. In this state, doing an enter will start reading the paragraphs in the current section of the TOC. The / key in this state will direct focus on the search box.

  4. Inputting text in the search box. An enter will open a new page with the search results. An esc will trap the user out of the search box. The user can now start using the n and p keys for doing the navigation.

The Figure below shows the navigation structure for the wikipedia web site.

Figure 1. Navigation structure for the wikipedia web site.

When the page first load, the finite state machine shown above is in the reading paragraphs mode. The user can start using the n and p keys to read through the paragraphs.

3. How to start using the AxsJAX enhanced Wikipedia

All you need to do is make sure that you have the following:

  1. A modern Web browser like Firefox 2.0 or later that supports W3C ARIA.
  2. An adaptive technology that will respond correctly to the accessibility enhancements introduced by W3C ARIA. In particular, many of the enhancements injected by AxsJAX depend on support for live regions a feature that enables adaptive technologies like screen readers and self-voicing browsers deal correctly with asynchronous updates to portions of a Web page.
If your setup meets these requirements, you would need to install GreaseMonkey and then install the GreaseMonkey script for AxsJAX enhancements for wikipedia. Restart the browser. Open the wikipedia web site and start searching. Please note that while there are language versions of wikipedia, the enhancements were developed only for the English language version as a proof of concept. The implementation files for the project can be found at http://ss12.info/svn/axsjax/Wikipedia.

4. Future Direction

We need to add handling for web pages that have no defined paragraphs or table of contents.

Authors: Gurmeet Singh <gurmeets@usc.edu>, Arvind Venkataraman <arvindve@usc.edu>, Kushal Bhatt <kbhatt@usc.edu>, Christopher Leung <christopher.leung@projectpossibility.org>