A study on e-commerce framework of MPEG-21 visual accessibility

Abstract

The desire for consuming multimedia content and the accessibility of information continues to increase at a rapid pace. New solutions are requested for the Universal Multimedia Access (UMA) in the integrated and harmonized way. MPEG-21 multimedia framework recently starts to standardize Digital Item Adaptation (DIA) for UMA. But, MPEG-21``s requirements do not mention about accessibility for users with a broad variation in human capabilities. Based on this problem, we choose two steps to solve the problem. First, we propose description for visual accessibility in the MPEG-21 DIA. The aim of MPEG-21 DIA for visual accessibility is to enable visually impaired people to get visual information from multimedia. Visual impairments are classified as blindness, low vision and color vision deficiency according to the description for visual accessibility. We perform different adaptations for each of visual impairment. Adapted images are tested by simulation program so as to recognize the appearance of the adapted image in the vision of visually challenged people. Experimental result shows that the adaptation technique works well in the MPEG-21 framework. Second, up to the present, there is no framework to apply MPEG-21 DIA for visual accessibility into media e-commerce. This paper proposes framework to show big picture about how to apply adaptation techniques to media e-commerce and evaluate it, comparing to Web Initiative Accessibility (WAI) in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). We conclude that MPEG-21``s adaptation technique for visual accessibility can be applied to e-commerce environment.