Re-Narration Web (part 1)

Résumé

The production and consumption of content on the Web has been mostly limited to the “literate”. Those who are not able to *read* much of Web content are in billions either due to illiteracy or due the context of the content authorship being foreign to that of the visitor of a Web page. The widespread availability of Internet enabled mobile devices have brought the Web to the palms of a much wider population in comparison to personal computers. This increase of the physical accessibility to the Web (hardware and services such as 3G) has made the issue of content accessibility, for people who cannot read, all the more important.

This work focuses on approaches for enabling Web access for the print-impaired or for people who cannot read. In countries like India, majority of people are uncomfortable with text, either because they are not literate or because they are literate only in their localized language.

Our work addresses this issue by developing a Web-framework, where people can contribute re-narratives on their sites and the page rendition tool can dynamically re-render the page based on user profile and available alternative narratives out there on the Web.

The tools are browser extensions for authoring and dynamic user profile based rendition of the web content - based on available contributions. This talk will discuss the technical aspects of the tools and the current state of these tools that are open source and available as Firefox extension. See alipi.janastu.org

Biographie

Dinesh has Computer Science background and is a founder of Janastu in Bangalore, India.

Janastu has been providing free and open source (FOSS) solutions and support to small not-for-profit and non-governmental organizations (NPOs/NGOs) since 2002. This includes one-on-one consulting regarding the information management needs of the NPOs/NGOs, building their online and offline knowledge bases, providing support to their projects : designing web-sites, configuring news-filters, helping them migrate to open source solutions, localization and Indian language issues support, geographic information collection, and comprehensive or modular open source software development.

Janastu is actively engaged with these initiatives :

Technology Governance and Citizenship (TGC) series of discussions about technology and society, with an emphasis on encouraging conversations between programmers, computer scientists, social scientists and practitioners.

Re-narration Web or Alipi or A11y.in is a set of tools for developing and rendering narratives that assist in accessing Web-content across cultural boundaries. Re-narration Web is therefore also about Web-accessibility for Inclusion of print-impaired.

Pantoto Communities is a Web-based software for Communities to Manage Community Knowledge. One of its current avatars is developing MyST, a school information management system for teachers.

Principles of Programming (PoP) uses Javascript to develop a Web-browser based course for the Web 2.0 era.

Indian Digital Heritage at Hampi is a knowledge base that is to interconnect cultural resources from a number of contributing teams, in order to facilitate a custom Web-presentation of their work.