This article describes a research project aimed at improving search engine usability for sightless persons who use assistive technology to navigate the web. At the beginning of this research, a preliminary study was performed concerning accessibility and usability of search tools, and eight guidelines were formulated for designing search engine user interfaces. Then, the derived guidelines were applied in modifying the source code of Google's interface, while maintaining the same look and feel, in order to demonstrate that with very little effort it is possible to make interaction easier, more efficient, and less frustrating for sightless individuals. After providing a general overview of the project, the paper focuses on interface design and implementation.
Available accessibility guidelines do not necessarily guarantee usable web sites, in particular when specific groups of users with special needs are considered. We have identified 15 Web design criteria aiming to provide integrated support of accessibility and usability for vision-impaired users. In this paper, we present the results of a study investigating whether the application of such guidelines for vision-impaired users can actually improve their task performance when accessing Web applications. We report on two user tests, both involving vision-impaired users, which aim to provide empirical validation of the design criteria. During each test, users had to access and navigate two versions of a Web site: one version supporting the selected design criteria and one obtained with traditional techniques. Our results indicate that the 15 design criteria improved Web site usability both quantitatively and qualitatively by reducing the navigation time needed to perform the assigned tasks and by making the Web sites easier to navigate for blind and low-vision users.
Recently, in the attempt to increase blind people autonomy and improve their quality of life, a lot of effort has been devoted to develop technological travel aids. These systems can surrogate spatial information about the environment and deliver it to end-users through sensory substitution (auditory, haptic). However, despite the promising research outcomes, these solutions have met scarce acceptance in real-world. Often, this is also due to the limited involvement of real end users in the conceptual and design phases. In this manuscript, we propose a novel indoor navigation system based on wearable haptic technologies. All the developmental phases were driven by continuous feedback from visually impaired persons. The proposed travel aid system consists of a RGB-D camera, a processing unit to compute visual information for obstacle avoidance, and a wearable device, which can provide normal and tangential force cues for guidance in an unknown indoor environment. Experiments with blindfolded subjects and visually impaired participants show that our system could be an effective support during indoor navigation, and a viable tool for training blind people to the usage of travel aids.
The application of appropriate Web site design and evaluation methods helps to ensure more usable and accessible Web sites. While in the literature guidelines and evaluation methods for accessibility and usability are given and discussed separately, we aim at identifying the relationships between these two concepts, in particular considering usability criteria for accessible Web sites. In this work, we propose a set of such criteria targeted to improving the navigability for a specific group of disabled users, i.e., vision-impaired people. The identification of the eighteen criteria suggested herein was performed through empirical feedback, by which potential issues were identified. Subsequently, a systematic method was developed on the basis of the analysis of potential solutions, resulting in a classification of the criteria according to usability aspects. Some example applications of the proposed criteria to three existing public administration Web sites are discussed.
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