Soapie - Make the internet more visible

What is Soapie

Soapie is an open-source browser extension (support Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome) to make the internet more accessible for people who are sight impaired. We aim to use the cutting edge AI technology to fill in the blanks of a webpage (e.g. missing alt tag) or remove blocks to improve browsing experience for people in need. When installed and switched on, Soapie will automatically change the html of the webpage so it can be easily accessible for other assisting tools.

Ideology

Since the popularity of the internet, it has been changing our lives drastically. And for the sight impaired, browsing experience can be quite different form the rest of us. According to the NHS in the UK, there are almost 2 million people living with sight loss. Of these, around 360,000 are registered as blind or partially sighted.

Nowadays the responsibility of accessibility are upon the web designers and engineers, even though organisations are advocating the importance of accessibility design and there are laws to enforce the equality and accessibility, the browsing experience of sight impaired people are still depends of the awareness of the industry. We would like to give this power of having a smooth browsing experience to the users, by working closely with the community, we can build a tool that works on the users' side and will remove the dependences on the web designers.

Useful articles

1. Visually-impaired consumers - Ofcom
2. Sight-impaired people want to use technology but are excluded by cost and accessibility
3. Websites need to be more accessible for disabled people
4. ‘Web Accessibility Guidelines’ turn 10 but still less than 10% of sites are accessible
5. Accessibility: Images, “Alt” tags, and the “Out Loud” Experience
6. Image ALT Text

Other alt filling tools

Caption Crawler is a plug-in for the Edge and Chrome web browsers that provides additional information about images for screen reader users. Many images on the web lack captions (i.e., alt text). When a webpage loads, Caption Crawler identifies images that are missing captions and checks if it is captioned elsewhere on the web; if so, the discovered captions are made available to the screen reader. See also this article

However, it relies on captions of that images elswere on the internet