IMAGE Extension

Extension for the McGill IMAGE project. Making internet graphics accessible through rich audio and touch!

Have you ever wanted to hear a photograph or pie chart, and not just a description of what is in it? IMAGE (Internet Multimodal Access to Graphical Exploration) adds a new item to your browser’s context menu when you activate it on a graphic such as a photograph, on any webpage you visit. The goal is to provide people who are blind or have low vision with a new and useful experience of internet graphics that goes beyond automatically generating alt tags.

Once you have added the extension to your browser, activate IMAGE using a button next to a graphic on a webpage, or a menu item added your browser's right-click context menu. The graphic is sent to a server that creates a custom audio rendering, and if you are wearing headphones, uses “spatialized audio” so that you hear different parts of the graphic all around you, rendered as sounds. In addition, if you go to the extension's setting page, you can enable haptic devices such as the Haply and the Dot Pad in order to explore graphics with your sense of touch.

This release is a beta version of IMAGE, and does not work well on all graphics. To get started, we recommend visiting our tutorial page at https://image.a11y.mcgill.ca/pages/tutorial.html

INSTALLATION Read these instructions for installation before proceeding with installation

1. For most browsers, find the "Add to browser" button, where "browser" is the name of your browser. If you are using Edge, find the button labeled "Get Extension" or simply "Get".
2. From there, a pop-up window titled "Add "IMAGE Extension"" will ask you to confirm your decision. Confirm by clicking "Add Extension".

IMAGE is carried out by McGill University's Shared Reality Lab (SRL) [1], in strategic partnership with Gateway Navigation CCC Ltd [2] and the Canadian Council of the Blind (CCB) [3]. The project is funded by Innovation Science Economic Development Canada through the Assistive Technology Program. The motivation for this project is to improve the access to internet graphics for people who are blind or partially sighted.