IVICA: Spatial Parsing
Another interesting IVICA talk was Luis Francisco-Revilla's work on spatial hypertext for the visually impaired -- especially for non-sighted people.
Spatial hypertext is tends to be fundamentally visual: when we work in the Tinderbox map, we're expressing spatial relationships so we can see emergent structure. For example, here's a page in his javascript spatial hypertext tool WARP.
Luis' paper this year discussed how the spatial parser, which VIKI and its descendants use to automatically recognize patterns in the hypertext map, might help non-sighted people deal with the spatial structure of complex Web pages,
It would be nice, for example, if a screen reader could automatically figure out that this text is the main story and this is a sidebar and that is a pull-quote or an ad.
Maybe someone should write a Tinderbox export template for WARP, along the lines of the TiddlyWiki exporter!