Abstract
As time goes on, the influence of Internet becomes more and more noticeable. Internet has shortened the distance between each other. With the development of multimedia technology, a lot of webpage designers use a large number of magnificent audio-visual contents to make the characteristics of the webpage stand out and attractive. However, the difficulties which the disabled persons have when browsing through the webpages have not been taken into consideration. As a result, the disabled persons, especially the blind people can not use the resources of Internet swimmingly, and thus they may be refused by the Internet, not to mention that they can surf the Web by themselves. In this research, Google Website was taken as a Web prototype to get modified. Specialized Search Engine for the Blind (SSEB) was constructed with an accessible interface and some improved functions (i.e., searching assistance functions, user-centered functions, and specialized design for the blind). An experiment was conducted to verify the effect of SSEB. From experimental results, it’s significant that users attained better performance in SSEB than in Google. Users also showed higher satisfaction with SSEB. This research proves that the consideration for designing an accessible website for the blind users is very important. It is expected that the users group of SSEB can be expanded to all visual-impaired people in the future. So that all people can keep pace with the changing World Wide Web, and make good use of all the Internet resources without disabilities and limitations.