WebbIE

History

WebbIE was developed as a student project at the Department of Computation at UMIST. It was first released in 2002 and has been under development and release since. It is often bundled with the LookOUT screen reader and Thunder screen reader.

Technology

WebbIE uses the Microsoft WebBrowser ActiveX control to fetch and parse web pages, and then iterates through the DOM tree to create a text representation of the page. The implications of this include:

• There is a delay between the WebBrowser control rendering the web page for sighted people and presenting the DOM to WebbIE to process. WebbIE can only access the DOM when all images and other embedded content have been rendered, which for some slow or media-heavy sites can take time.
• The text representation is divorced from the underlying DOM, so realtime updates to the DOM (e.g. Ajax writes) may fail to be represented.

References

External links

• Homepage