WebVisum.com – crowdsourcing accessibility
It is quite interesting to see that several products right now try to crowdsource accessibility. IBM released their social accessibility project and another project caused quite a stir in the accessibility world: WebVisum.com.
The latter is a Firefox3 extension that ties in with Screen Readers to allow users to enhance pages they have problems with by adding the correct meta data while surfing the page. The more controversial feature of WebVisum though is that they also provide a CAPTCHA recognition service in the tool.
I’ve caught up with Marc Dohnal from WebVisum and asked him a few questions about the product:
Tags: accessibility, crowdsourcing, extension, firefox, webvisum
July 15th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Hi Chris,
well that’s yet another mightily interesting piece of news you provided here. The basic principle seems awesome. I have a concern though: aren’t these projects, in some way, into a sort of detrimental competition? Since the added meta-data will be updated separately and provided through two different techical means, and in some cases may even be of different quality, the users will be forced to make a choice between one and another. Because even if we can expect that both communities will do a great job at improving the meta-data, at least for a while there will be gaps and lacks, fulfilled by the other one. It would be excessively optimistic to expect that all the contributors will fill the gaps of any crowdsourcing-based accessibility project once they have found a glitch to be fixed on a given website.
Shouldn’t these projects talk to each other, and share whatever data are contributed? What’s your view on this?