Participatory Design for Creating Conversational Agents to Improve Web Accessibility

This contribution presents the PROTECT (imPROving ciTizEn inClusivity Through Conversational AI) project, which aims to improve web accessibility offering benefits to fragile populations through conversational agents, addressing primarily blind and visually impaired (BVI) users. The research adopts a participatory design approach, involving BVI users in the co-design and testing of the ConWeb prototypes, a middleware solution that facilitates conversational web browsing. This contribution reports about some performed user research and outlines the experimental design of a study that intends to investigate if and how CA technology can address some of the current limitations of screen readers, thereby significantly improving website accessibility and user experience.