WebbIE
WebbIE is a freeware web browser designed for screen reader users. It re-presents web pages as text with a caret, allowing users to use their existing screen reader or assistive technology to read it, but is not self-voicing, unlike (for example) Home Page Reader.
| Developer(s) | Alasdair King |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 5.0.0 [1]
/ December 22, 2018 |
| Operating system | Windows |
| Type | Web browser |
| Website | http://www.webbie.org.uk/webbrowser/index.htm |
History
WebbIE was developed as a student project at the Department of Computation at UMIST. It was first released in 2002 and has been under development and release since. It is often bundled with the LookOUT screen reader and Thunder screen reader.
Technology
WebbIE uses the Microsoft WebBrowser ActiveX control to fetch and parse web pages into the W3C DOM and MSHTML DOM. It then iterates through the DOM creating a text representation. The implications of this include:
- There is a delay between the WebBrowser control rendering the web page for sighted people and presenting the DOM to WebbIE to process. WebbIE can only access the DOM when all images and other embedded content have been rendered, which for some slow or media-heavy sites can take time.
- The text representation is divorced from the underlying DOM, so realtime updates to the DOM (e.g. Ajax writes) may fail to be represented.
gollark: Maybe this needs its own component in Rust for something something high performance.
gollark: I could use a bincode-type thing, chunk messages into groups of maybe a thousand each, and run them through zstandard compression, and then have a few uncompressed statistics, but I don't want ABR to store too much state in memory.
gollark: Maybe it should gather data per hour. Or I could try and actually design some extremely densely packed representation.
gollark: Message contents and timestamps would be too big unless I have some ultra-compressed packed form.
gollark: That is a display issue. I'm talking about what needs GATHERING.
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