Butterfleye: Supporting the Development of Accessible Web Applications for Users with Severe Motor-Impairment

Abstract

Various accessibility standards and guidelines exist, targeting different disabilities. Nonetheless persons suffering from Severe Motor Disabilities (SMD) are generally excluded from development efforts, mainly because of a lack in accessibility regulations, standards and developer support. This work presents Butterfleye, a novel developer-centric tool that facilitates the development of accessible gaze-driven web applications for SMD users. Butterfleye relies and builds upon a widely-adopted open-source front-end framework to incentivise frictionless developer adoption. Low cost eye-tracking devices are also examined to lower barriers for end-user adoption. We present an open-source library developed iteratively over a series of user-centric studies and report initial evidence of, and observations on, its effectiveness with SMD users.

Interface Modeling for Digital Device Control According to Disability Type in Web

“…The gaze tracking technology is receiving the most attention as a technology for web browsing of upper limb disabilities. In the existing research, when controlling an object through gaze tracking, an execution command is performed on a pointed object such as a mouse click through the dwell time [11] or eye blink [12]. However, the dwell time and eye blink method for pointer execution cause a problem of repeated pointer execution malfunction when the user wants to see only the screen without giving a gaze command.…”