WebinSitu: A Comparative Analysis of Blind and Sighted Browsing Behavior
By Bigham, Jeffrey P.; Cavender, Anna C.; Brudvik, Jeremy T.; Wobbrock, Jacob O.; Ladner, Richard E.; ASSETS 2007 - The Ninth International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, pp. 51-66Publication Date: October 15-17, 2007
Study investigating the accessibility of the web as experienced by web users who are blind. The in-situ study, which was conducted remotely for 7 consecutive days, used 10 blind participants (5 female) from 18 to 63 years old, and 10 sighted participants (3 female) 19 to 61 years old. Participants used the assistive technology and software to which they were already accustomed and had configured according to preference. An advanced web proxy was used that leverages AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology to record both the pages viewed and the actions taken by users on the web pages they visited. Subsequent analysis indicated that blind web users employ coping strategies to overcome many accessibility problems and are undeterred from visiting pages containing them, although they took more time to access all pages than their sighted counterparts. Blind users avoided pages containing severe accessibility problems, e.g. those related to dynamic content. In all cases, blind participants were less likely than sighted participants to interact with page elements that exhibited accessibility problems. Implications for further studies are discussed.
Published by: Association for Computing Machinery (Website:http://www.acm.org)
SIGACCESS (ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing) (Web Site: http://www.sigaccess.org )
