Using mediation dialogs to improve navigation of low literate users on the web

Abstract

In Brazil a great number of essential services are only provided over the internet. These services should be available to any users, regardless of their individual skills or disabilities. Functional illiterates are those who have reading and understanding difficulties. These users have large access problems when using the internet, as most of its content is presented as text, including the front-end pages for the services mentioned before. The objective of this research is to present and evaluate the results of using a technique that matches mediation with an assistive technology used to create dialogs over the original page layer from a Web site, allowing creation and authoring of a new accessible layer for the non-accessible existing pages, focusing on functional illiterate users.