Web Accessibility Enhancement for Medical Consultation Platforms

With a rapid evolution of the healthcare domain and COVID outbreak, people start using online consultation platforms to seek treatments. However, the design of medical web pages is complex due to it integrates a lot of information. The goal of this research is to make the Web of medical consultation platforms more accessible for people with visual impairments, especially the elderly. The research was motivated by conducting a survey with 15 elderly people to learn about their needs when visiting the medical web pages. Based on the results, we proposed and designed a new system, TarsiEyes, which not only mined data information from the online platform, but it also provided a new interface integrating results from crawler technology and web customization for accessibility enhancement. The results of the user study with eight users showed that the proposed design significantly enhanced reading speed, reading comprehension and readability of the medical web pages.