Enhancing pervasive Web accessibility with rule-based adaptation strategy

Content adaptation has shown significant benefits by enhancing Web accessibility to meet user’s requirements in heterogeneous environments. Adaptation rules can provide an efficient way to transform Web contents into adapted ones that conform to requesters’ contexts. However, the rule base management becomes a challenge while taking requesters’ contexts into account. In this paper, we refer requesters’ contextual requirements (or contexts in short) to the information that may affect their perceptions of browsing Web contents, such as requesters’ preferences and sensations, situated places, as well as devices and network connectivity. We have used JESS to design and implement dynamic adaptation strategies to guide the transformation process. Adaptation strategies are designed to improve rule base efficiency by performing dynamic scheduling of rule firing in an agenda. An adaptation strategy is composed of selected adaptation rules based on requesters’ contexts. When a user’s context changed, new adaptation strategy will be generated automatically by rearranging adaptation rules. By using JESS, we can dramatically reduce the number of adaptation rules from 54 to 22. The experiment results indicate our adaptation strategy can successfully adapt Web contents to satisfy requesters’ contexts and obtain superior performance.