This paper presents a case study regarding the usability evaluation of navigation tasks by people with intellectual disabilities. The aim was to investigate the factors affecting usability, by comparing their user-Web interactions and underline the difficulties observed. For that purpose, two distinct study phases were performed: the first consisted in comparing interaction using two different search engines' layouts (Google and SAPO) and the second phase consisted in a preliminary evaluation to analyze how users performed the tasks with the usual input devices (keyboard and mouse) and provide an alternative interface to help overcome possible interaction problems and enhance autonomy. For the latter, we compared two different interfaces: a WIMP-based one and speech-based one. The main results obtained showed that users had a better performance with Google (with a simpler layout) than with SAPO (with a complex layout), and despite displaying a good keyboard handling ability, they did not show autonomy using this input device (due to the need for reading/ writing when handling this device). In this perspective, Google's speech recognition application could indeed be considered an alternative for interaction. However, we found that the speech recognition interface is not as robust as it should be: it could be more precise and less prone to errors due to poor word pronunciation. After this two-phased study, we think we may be able to infer some recommendations to be used by developers in order to create more intuitive layouts for easy navigation regarding this group of people, and thereby facilitate digital inclusion.
In recent years there has been a boom of different natural interaction paradigms, such as touch, tangible or gesture-based interfaces, that make better use of human's innate skills rather than imposing new learning processes. However, no work has been reported that systematically evaluates how these interfaces influence users' performance with regard to their level of digital literacy or even age. Furthermore, it is also important to understand the interaction paradigms' impact when performing basic operations, such as data selection, insertion and manipulation, and which interface could be the most efficient for each task. This paper reports the first step of an exploratory evaluation about the relationship between different interaction paradigms and specific target-audiences: dealing with a selection task. We conducted an experiment with 60 subjects to evaluate how different interfaces may influence the performance of specific groups of users. Four input modalities are evaluated in a selection task and results for these different user groups are reported in terms of performance, efficacy (error rate) and user preference. For each group of users, we determined there was a statistically significant difference between the mean time taken to complete the task in each interface. Also, the one input modality every user was accustomed with (the computer mouse) was the one that showed the most discrepancy regarding performance between the groups. We believe that this study raises new issues for future research.
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