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About the Web Access Gateway
Welcome to the Web access gateway. This is an online ``browser within
a browser''; it gives you more control over how websites are displayed, regardless
of which browser you have to use. The gateway currently has two main purposes:
- To make the Web easier to access for print-disabled users (such as users
with low vision or dyslexia);
- To allow speakers of other languages to view Web pages written in them,
when the encodings are not supported by their browsers. (This uses
GIFs - see GIF Patent
Problems and the Language Viewer)
The gateway works by intercepting your Web browsing in such a way that the
gateway computer can sort out the Web pages before you see them. It
works with all browsers and operating systems as long as the browser supports
forms [1]. You
can adjust it to work the way you want to.
If you need an academic paper about the gateway, try this:
Silas S Brown & Peter Robinson. A World Wide Web Mediator for
Users with Low Vision. CHI 2001 Workshop No. 14. PDF format
(hosted at ics.forth.gr)
The gateway can also (sometimes) be used as a rudimentary viewer of such
things as Flash and WAP, if you have no other means of displaying them.
In the case of WAP, the intention is that print-disabled users can use WAP
sites on their normal desktop browsers.
Following is a list of some of the sites that run the gateway.
If you are using the gateway to read a language, please select the ``Disable
all sight-related access options'' box and then the ``Characters'' button.
Alternatively you can try one of the language entry pages.
UK |
Australia
- UK:
- Gateway on access.ucam.org
(Cambridge University)
Has images for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek and Cyrillic.
In order to avoid the leakage of documents that are restricted to
the university, all requests coming from outside the university will
be processed using a proxy that is outside the university; this may
slow things down a little.
- Gateway
on kangzhuang.ucam.org (Clark Lu, Cambridge)
Has images for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek and Cyrillic.
Runs on a personal machine with a Broadband connection. Updated
directly.
- Gateway on
www.socratec.co.uk (Mike Hough)
Sight-related options only. Updated directly.
- Gateway
on www.accu.org (Association of C and C++ Users)
Sight-related options only. Updated directly.
- Gateway on
www.flatline.org.uk (Peter Clay)
Sight-related options only. Updated within 24 hours of ACCU.
- Australia:
- I understand the gateway is also installed in the USA's National Oceanic
& Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Social Security Administration
(SSA) and National Science Foundation (NSF), among other places.
Language entry pages: These are presets to help people get
started in their languages more quickly, and only cover the languages most popular
with the gateway;
if your language is not listed then the gateway might still
support it.
- Chinese:
- Japanese:
- Korean:
Download
To install the access gateway on your Web server, you need a shell account with
sufficient privileges. FTP access is NOT sufficient. If you do not
have Unix then you have to install various Unix tools; this has been done but
it would be simpler just to get a Unix shell account. Some degree of Unix
competence is assumed.
The Unix installation script should work on most Unix systems. It will
ask some questions, configure the gateway, compile it, install it, clean up,
and optionally add a cron job to periodically check for updates (recommended).
The following command should fetch and run the installation script:
lynx -source http://www.accu.org/access/public/install.sh > install.sh && chmod +x install.sh && ./install.sh
(Please note that this line is quite long - make sure you get all of it.)
The source is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
There is absolutely no warranty.
The gateway has an extensions mechanism, which is documented in extenlib.h.
Note that the installation script defaults to deleting the source code once
the gateway has been compiled, so as to save space on the server; you might
want to change this if you want to write extensions.
Usage
The
online help gives detailed
information about its use (along with a longer description of ``web hijacking''
etc), and many users will be able to start without having to read the help.
A number of people have expressed an interest in using the gateway to preprocess
their pages (ie. put up pages that have already been processed). This
can be used, for example, on sites that teach a language where character substitution
is required. I've added a hack that lets you do this:
- Go to the page in the gateway and adjust the options to your liking.
- Append &AP=1 (case is important) to the long URL and press
Enter. You should now get a version of the page that is suitable for
saving as a standalone document.
- Save it.
You may wish to bookmark the long URL with the
&AP=1, for when
you update the page. If you have several pages that you want the gateway to
process, you may wish to write yourself an update script that does all this
for each page, for example, one containing commands like:
lynx -source "http://long-URL-goes-here&AP=1" > page1-preprocessed.html
Wildcards are also possible (using for).
Brief history
In the spring vacation of 1998, I wrote the Access Gateway in C++ using the
text editor of a Psion 3a palmtop, and I compiled it on return to Cambridge.
It was meant to help with my own sight-related problems and with those of various
groups of visually impaired users on the Internet who had been campaigning to
webmasters about writing HTML to suit their needs (and/or their access software's
limitations). Since then I have been making various modifications from
time to time to improve the way it renders pages - the nice thing about developing
the Access Gateway is that, if you don't like some bad practice on a Web page,
you can often program the gateway to deal with it.
My investigations into multilingual computing led me to add the character
conversion facilities, for the benefit of international students etc.
At the start of October 1998, it was (in theory) ready to cope with 30 languages
with fully automatic detection of encodings for each (although of course you
can customise this). However, obtaining suitable sets of images proved
more difficult.
Unfortunately my attempts to add translation capabilities to the gateway
were not adequate. For those who have seen earlier versions, the fact
that they were better than some of the stuff ``out there'' did not make them
adequate.
All of the program's messages, documentation etc is in English. If
you would be interested in making a translation then please contact me before
you start.
Mailing list and bugs
There is now a mailing list for gateway users to support each other. I
expect (hope) that the traffic will be quite low. Anyone is welcome to
join. To subscribe, send an email to majordomo@accu.org with the following
command in the body of the message:
subscribe access-gateway-users
An incomplete
bug list is also available.
Dislcaimer: The author is not responsible for,
and has no authority over, the websites that host the Access Gateway.
There is no warranty, either express or implied. It is the user, not the
author, that chooses which pages to process, and the author does not endorse
(and is not responsible for) any illegal viewing or modification of data, whether
the program is functioning properly or not.
[1] Technical
footnote: If you do not have a browser that supports forms, or you are browsing
the web via an email gateway, you can still use the access gateway if you know
how to read HTML forms and generate CGI 'GET' URLs. In fact, you can use
the gateway to submit a 'POST' form using a 'GET' URL - the gateway itself really
doesn't care which method is used, and will pass on the request as a 'POST'
if you set the right parameter.
All material © Silas S. Brown unless otherwise stated.
