I’ve been banging on about experiential transcoding for quite awhile now – well since the EPSRC ‘SASWAT’ project and the Google ‘ACup’ project. The rationale is simple, sighted designers build pages to attract a sighted users attention to ‘important’ parts of the website. Even if they aren’t good designers, people will generally look at similar parts of the page as each other – or so eye tracking studies tell us.

This shared experience is termed experiential and by transcoding based on predictions of user experience (where people will look) we can transcode resources so that blind users get the same experience as sighted ones.

The trick, however, is in the gaze prediction, and this is where we go on our recently accepted W4A Paper…

Transcoding web pages for ease of use for small screen device users and for disabled users have been researched extensively. However, there has been very little research on transcoding web pages based on understanding and predicting users’ experiences. In this paper, we discuss the concept of experience-based transcoding, called “experiential transcoding”, and present our initial work on identifying patterns in eye-tracking data to guide transcoding of web pages for improving the experience of blind and situationally impaired users.