Jinglan Zhang, Margot Brereton, Peter Purgathofer, Geraldine Fitzpatrick and me are currently conducting research into enhancing web accessibility for people with a disability. In first line, this work is suppossed to delight people who usually cannot operate a computer by offering them a way for simple web searches which might result in some appealing images.

We propose to utilize RFID tokens to store and materialize website addresses into tangible handles for web access. Most importantly, we use tokens to store frequently used key words and serve as visual aids to enable query through the combination of different search tokens.

As a consequence, the user can search for a preset number of keywords without typing. In the demo video, we show how a image search for "pink cake" is initiated (note, one participant enjoyed browsing images of pink cake on the Internet, therefore we gave the prototype the name of "pink cake"). This works by simply placing the tokens "pink", "cake" and "start image search" on the RFID reader device. Tokens can also hold links to songs or to URLs. The tokens can be configured quite easiliy (see second video).

As a next step, we plan to co-desing customized tokens (tangible objects) and create them with our 3D printer.

First Demo Videos

Forthcoming Publication

• Zhang, J.,  Brereton, M.,  Purgathofer, P.,  Fitzpatrick, G., & Güldenpfennig, G. (2016) Handle the Way: Enhancing Web Accessibility for People with Disability. Work-in-progress Paper accepted for DIS'16.