Designing Intelligent Agents To Support Universal Accessibility Of E-Commerce Services

E. Pontelli * and T. C. Son

Knowledge Representation, Logic, and Advanced Programming Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, MSC CS, P.O. Box 30001, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA

Received 30 October 2002; revised 20 February 2003; accepted 28 February 2003. ; Available online 6 May 2003.

Abstract

We propose the design of an intelligent agent to improve accessibility of E-commerce applications and Web sites for visually impaired individuals. An important feature of this design is the application of knowledge representation technology––specifically conceptual structures––to explicitly capture and represent the navigational semantics of each document. This allows one to view the process of navigating a complex HTML document––e.g., a document containing tables and complex forms––as solving goals with respect to an action theory, i.e., as a planning problem. This information will be used by agents to provide a level of intelligence in the navigation process, allow users to express high level navigation goals, solve such goals using planning techniques. Effectively, the navigation of the complex components of HTML documents will be done by agents, on behalf of the visually impaired user.

Author Keywords: Universal accessibility; Agents design; Planning; Answer set programming; Universal accessibility

*Corresponding author. Fax: +1-505-646-1002.

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