Maddala Saraswati Soumya received her MS in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). Her research work was supervised by Dr. Venkatesh Choppella. Here’s a summary of her research work on Semantic Renarration for improving information accessibility on the web:
With a tremendous increase in the user population of the world wide web across the globe, the diversity amongst its users has also increased unpredictably. It is now more than ever, essential to provide accessibility and enhance universal inclusivity. Web accessibility enables equal access to information on the world wide web regardless of disability. It is imperative that we address the problem of web accessibility by leveraging the current trends in the state-of-the-art. In this dissertation, we present a systematic mapping study on web accessibility with an emphasis on the web annotation intervention. The aim of this study is to provide a structure to the body of knowledge and identify key knowledge gaps. We performed a systematic investigation of the publications in the areas of web accessibility in the context of web annotation. As a part of this study, we framed research questions, defined inclusion-exclusion criteria and formulated a classification scheme. We then mapped and analysed the obtained set of research publications. From a preliminary set of 2018 articles, we selected a set of 55 for our study. The insights gained from this mapping study can be used to develop tools and formulate strategies for the enhancement of accessibility and overcome existing barriers.
In this dissertation we focus on the human users and aid them in better knowledge formation. We suggest that users face accessibility challenges in gathering information, especially when it is in a different representation system than they are used to. We identify this as a semantic gap. To overcome this we propose a client-side, browser based information modification tool called Renarration UI. We focus on both the design and implementation aspects of this tool and validate it by conducting an empirical study (n=10).
Results are encouraging and suggest that renarration of web pages has potential to address these information accessibility issues. We also propose another client-side, browser-based information augmentation tool called SeRena. This semantic renarration tool enhances the accessibility of the end-user by facilitating the end-user with relevant additional information.
To accomplish this we develop an ontology and populate a Knowledge Base(KB) with instances of the ontology. We then semantically annotate the web page to provide the end-user with additional information from the KB.