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The Web has become an indispensable medium used by people across the world for education, information, entertainment, social interaction as well as for various daily activities involving shopping and employment-related tasks. It is therefore becoming increasingly essential that the Web must be accessible to all people to provide equal access and equal opportunity. This is specifically more important for people with various kind of disabilities. Several initiatives such as development of Web accessibility guidelines, tools and technologies have been undertaken to make the Web usable for people with different disabilities. However, only a handful of them are aimed at people with Severe Speech and Motor Impairment (SSMI). This paper aims to present a Web browsing interface for people with severe speech and motor impairment.

The browser allows easy dissemination of information through World Wide Web for people with SSMI. The browser is augmented with both automatic as well as manual scanning mechanisms through which a motor disorder person can access the browser graphical user interface (GUI). Further, the browser provides an intelligent content scanning mechanism through which the Web contents can be accessed with less time and cognitive effort. Along with the desktop version, WebSanyog is successfully ported on Android-based tablets to make the system portable.

The system has been exhaustively field tested by people with SSMI. The browser has been deployed at the Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy (IICP), Kolkata. The performance of the browser has been measured in terms of three parameters: The Task execution time (TET); Error rates analysis (ER); and Overall usability score by the subject. The evaluation results suggests that the proposed Web browsing interface is effective in terms of task execution time, cognitive effort and overall user satisfaction.

The browser GUI is integrated with an automatic scanning mechanism as an alternate way to access and navigate through Web pages, instead of using keyboard and mouse. The browser provides novel content access mechanisms that makes navigating through Web page contents like links, images and embedded videos easier and faster. To facilitate text entry, the browser provides two different options, namely, the predictive virtual scanning keyboard and a novel icon-based query entry scheme that allows generating search queries through the selection of multiple icons.

It has become common for children to browse web pages. However, there is no web browser that takes into account children's characteristics on information acquisition. Therefore, even though such general pages have a variety and detailed information, children cannot effectively use the internet with current web browsers, e.g. they have difficulty in understanding the contents and easily get bored when browsing general pages. The purpose of this paper is to propose a children‐oriented web browser, which aims to keep children's interest on pages and help them understand the contents of the pages.

The paper designed and implemented a web browser for children using a bubble metaphor, which converts general pages into a children‐friendly presentation. The browser is displayed in an undersea scene and presents contents of a web page in bubbles of different sizes, speeds, and colors. Furthermore, it presents the details of the content in a picture book style in a way that children can easily understand.

The paper conducts a user experiment with 13 children between four and ten years of age. The experimental results show that the browser changes general pages into a children‐friendly presentation and make a web browsing fun for children.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first investigation into the web browsing characteristics of children. The findings may be useful to researchers who are interested in the relationships between children and the web, as well as information acquisition of children.

The paper aims to present an outline how libraries are harnessing browser extensions to provide an easy and convenient access to library resources and services. Investigating the features, purposes of use and types of browser extensions prevalent among libraries in different regions, the paper seeks to measure the degree of implementation of browser extensions.

Stratified sampling method was followed to select academic libraries, and convenient sampling method was applied to select public libraries from four continents – Asia, Oceania, Europe and North America. Two-step web content analysis was applied to gather data along the select dimensions.

The study contributes to the recent advances in application of browser extension with numerous examples focussing on the relevance of different approaches adopted by the libraries. Providing a framework of proportionate implementation along checkpoints, the study also highlights degree of acceptance of browser extension among libraries in different regions.

The investigation was restricted to libraries having English websites and confined to four continents only. This study aims at improving understanding among the librarians about the intended use and application of browser extension and helping them benchmark their effort in support of education, research and training. The current investigation expands the scope of future research on remaining regions and website whose contents are in non-English language to attain a broader perspective of its implementation.

The article may guide library professionals to use, develop and promote the implementation of browser extension in libraries. The checkpoints used here may serve as bedrock for framing questionnaire and interview schedule for conducting future research examining users’ perception of browser extension in the context of library resources and usage pattern, to fully comprehend its practicability and usefulness.

By reviewing different information visualization techniques for securing web information systems, this paper aims to provide a foundation for further studies of the same topic. Another purpose of the paper is to discover directions in which there is a lack of extensive research, thereby encouraging more investigations.

The related techniques are classified first by their locations in the web information systems architecture: client side, server side, and application side. Then the techniques in each category are further classified based on attributes specific to that category.

Although there is much research on information visualization for securing web browser user interface and server side systems, there are very few studies about the same techniques on web application side.

This paper is the first published paper reviewing extensively information visualization techniques for securing web information systems. The classification used here offers a framework for further studies as well as in‐depth investigations.

The purpose of this paper is to take a novel approach to help users better understand and be more aware of what third parties are learning about them as they browse the web.

The approach the authors take is to personalize the awareness by using JavaScript embedded in a web page to examine portions of a user's web‐browser history in order to ascertain web sites that the user has visited. The authors then personalize information reported to the user about what third‐party sites are tracking the user's behavior along with demographic information these sites may be inferring from these visited sites and the user's geographic location.

It was found that 63 percent of users agreed with a statement of concern for third parties monitoring activities, about half of the respondents agreed with a concern for knowledge about a user's location and a little more than half agreed to concern about inference of demographic information. It was found that females are more concerned about these issues than males. In terms of possible actions, a majority of users report using an ad blocker tool and even more delete cookies at least some amount of time. Using an opt‐out mechanism or removing browser history is done by less than 20 percent of users. Despite expressing more concern for information known by third parties, females are not significantly more likely to take actions that may limit what is leaked to these third parties. A contributor to this discrepancy is that females were much less likely to know their settings for many of the actions, indicating less familiarity with them.

Web privacy is an important social issue so helping users to better understand tracking of their actions, along with what actions can be taken to limit tracking, is important.

The paper takes an original approach to helping users understand what third parties learn about them and follows up that approach with a survey of user attitudes and actions on this important topic.

Provides tips and insights to increase the “Web intuition” of the user. Mentions, however, that the Web is changing very rapidly and that anything written about it will be partly obsolete straight away.

This paper aims to present a viable approach for designing and implementing a generic per‐fee‐link framework. It also aims to design this framework to be used with any payment protocol and test it with two existing ones.

The paper presents a per‐fee‐link framework based on several generic components. These components have been developed and tested in order to prove the viability of the proposed framework.

The results show that is possible to establish a per‐fee‐link framework. Four core components are defined: first, the different modules needed for browsers and web servers, second, an extended payment protocol (EPP), which negotiates the payment protocol to use and encapsulates its related messages, third, an API for e‐wallets, which is independent of the payment protocol, to incorporate the protocols to use with EPP and finally, the definition of a per‐fee‐link that associates payment information to a link.

The framework presented shows a uniform way of using payment protocols that can increase the trust of end users. Furthermore, it has been developed and tested.

The contribution describes the components needed for supporting the framework. Its feasibility has been checked through an implementation and it facilitates the payment for content on the web. Thus, content providers can obtain an alternative revenue source to advertisement or subscription. Furthermore, developers, vendors and customers can see that the incorporation of payment protocols to the system is facilitated. Finally, the users obtain a uniform way to make payments that increases the perception of trust.

This paper aims to develop a diffusion model that can be used to understand and forecast the market growth of service products in a competitive environment. Despite the fast growth of the service sector, the existing literature has dedicated little effort to modeling the market growth of service products.

The authors propose a choice-type diffusion model that links the issues of service product utility, customers’ choice preference, customer switching behavior and the market growth of service products. The authors use the market data of one online product and assess the performance of the proposed model using this case.

The results demonstrate the model’s good fitting and forecasting performance. Specifically, the proposed model has better performance than the benchmarks the authors choose from the existing literature.

This study shows that market growth of service products can have different diffusion patterns with that of durable goods, which is evidence of the needs for specific models for service diffusion. Further, this study demonstrates the important role of customer switching in service diffusion. Also for marketing practitioners, this study provides an explanation and forecasting tool for the market growth of service products, which can be used for marketing planning in the service industry.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which brand positioning elements are manifested in the business‐to‐business (B2B) online environment.

The UK print industry is used to investigate the web site elements used to communicate positioning elements through the content analysis of corporate web pages of 30 UK print suppliers.

A framework is developed to show how web site communications are manifested in the online B2B environment.

Because the research vehicle is a sample of websites from only one industry the findings may not be transferable to all industries nor to the whole industry. However, the model is a useful framework for helping managers to plan their online communications.

The paper concludes by giving recommendations about how the framework can be used by practitioners in order to improve the linkage between communications messages and the means for transferring these messages.

This is a novel approach to examining branding elements in the online environment. Comparatively little literature exists which examines branding in the online B2B environment.

This contribution looks at some relatively new and recent advanced tools, techniques, methods and standards related to the Internet which form the basis for mixtures of documents and services, which we can call ‘document+program hybrids’. The new Internet systems contribute to an evolution from documents on the one side and computer programs on the other side, neatly separated, apart from each other, without much interaction, so that the static document can also exist without computers and networks, to hybrid systems where the classical distinction between the contents and the container is blurred; where all components are integrated, interwoven and exist in synergy with each other; they can be more dynamic and interactive, in comparison with more classical and static documents, by involving and exploiting the power of computers and networks. A collection is presented of Internet‐based sources (URLs) that can serve as illustrations. Recent methods, techniques, standards and protocols on the Internet that form the basis of the evolution are listed. As professional information intermediaries, the authors also consider the impact in the area of online access to information and knowledge.