IMAGE: An Open-Source, Extensible Framework for Deploying Accessible Audio and Haptic Renderings of Web Graphics

Abstract

For accessibility practitioners, creating and deploying novel multimedia interactions for people with disabilities is a nontrivial task. As a result, many projects aiming to support such accessibility needs come and go, or never make it to a public release. To reduce the overhead involved in deploying and maintaining a system that transforms web content into multimodal renderings, we created an open-source, modular microservices architecture as part of the IMAGE project. This project aims to design richer means of interacting with web graphics than is afforded by a screen reader and text descriptions alone. To benefit the community of accessibility software developers, we discuss this architecture and explain how it provides support for several multimodal processing pipelines. Beyond illustrating the initial use case that motivated this effort, we further describe two use cases outside the scope of our project in order to explain how a team could use the architecture to develop and deploy accessible solutions for their own work. We then discuss our team’s experience working with the IMAGE architecture, informed by discussions with six project members, and provide recommendations to other practitioners considering applying the framework to their own accessibility projects.