Conceptual Interactive Search Engine Interface for Visually Impaired Web Users

Abstract

The Internet is the main source of information nowadays. Consequently, end users need to be knowledgeable about how to use search engines in order to locate relevant information in a reasonable time with minimal effort. On the other hand, search engines must provide different and alternative ways to represent the search results to facilitate the user access to the information especially for the visually impaired (VI) users. Our research aim is to produce a new representational model for the search engine results targeting VI users. The result of this study will be a functional prototype that summarizes the search results as main ideas that are identified as concepts. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) defines a concept as the maximum number of objects that are sharing the maximum number of features or attributes. Concepts are discovered by analyzing data patterns for the text of the study. The outcome of the first step of summarization concepts as keywords is used to minimize the number of listed websites and URLs that match the user selection of the multi-level tree of concepts. This scenario of summarization can give the user different directions for the shortest path to reach the target information with the minimum amount of time and effort required. The purpose of these directions can be either to proceed with reading the whole document in detail, or to continue the search for finding other related documents that match the user's inquiry. Experiments run on an iterative testing basis until VI users find proper results that satisfy their needs for the search context. User observations and interpretations based on the experiments are used for the user evaluation. This study will guide us for designing a new model for summarizing search results based on the FCA algorithm to the VI end users, and with a new representation interface based on the discovered concepts' weights.