[Paper Review #10 9/12/16] Survey: Improving Document Accessibility from the Blind and Visually Impaired User’s Point of View
Survey: Improving Document Accessibility from the Blind and Visually Impaired User’s Point of View
Martin Dorigo, Bettina Harriehausen-Mühlbauer, Ingo Stengel, and Paul S. Dowland
HCII 2011, 6 pages except references.
Summary
A survey was conducted targeting 25,000 visually impaired people. According to International Classification of Diseases (ICD), they classified the impairment to 6 categories: 1) blind without light perception, 2) blind with light perception, 3) visus worse than 0.05, 4) visus worse than 0.1, 5) visus worse than 0.3, 6) visus worse than 1.0. 61% of the participants were visually impaired by birth. The authors asks 16 questions regarding their reading experience: media format, problems, wishes for new assistive technology.Four key issues in reading experience
- Structure Overview: All participants wanted a better overview over the structure. Specifically headings > input fields, lists > tables > bookmarks > paragraphs > graphics.
- Content Overview: skimming fast over the information. A faster content overview is more preferred than structure overview [Note: the authors miss number here.]
- Usability of Assistive Technologies: Screen readers have different key sequences to control them.
- Accessibility: All participants mention that they get documents that are not accessible for them.