Adults with High-functioning Autism Process Web Pages With Similar Accuracy but Higher Cognitive Effort Compared to Controls

Abstract

To accommodate the needs of web users with high-functioning autism, a designer's only option at present is to rely on guidelines that: i) have not been empirically evaluated and ii) do not account for the different levels of autism severity. Before designing effective interventions, we need to obtain an empirical understanding of the aspects that specific user groups need support with. This has not yet been done for web users at the high ends of the autism spectrum, as often they appear to execute tasks effortlessly, without facing barriers related to their neurodiverse processing style. This paper investigates the accuracy and efficiency with which high-functioning web users with autism and a control group of neurotypical participants obtain information from web pages. Measures include answer correctness and a number of eye-tracking features. The results indicate similar levels of accuracy for the two groups at the expense of efficiency for the autism group, showing that the autism group invests more cognitive effort in order to achieve the same results as their neurotypical counterparts.

The State of Web Accessibility for People with Cognitive Disabilities: A Rapid Evidence Assessment

“…People with concussions and people with memory loss related to dementia and/or old age [ 44 , 45 , 46 ] benefit from the inclusion of audio, video, and picture modes of sharing information. Similarly, people with autism benefit from webpages with limited scrolling and direct navigation pathways [ 47 , 48 ]. As in the previous section, it is not necessarily a contribution of this review to point out that many studies focus on text-based websites or web applications.…”

“Keep it simple!”: an eye-tracking study for exploring complexity and distinguishability of web pages for people with autism

“…However, there was no significant difference between the ASD and controlgroup participants in terms of the total fixation count and the number of transitions between elements for the browsing tasks, even though we expected that the ASD group would have higher fixation counts and transitions between different elements. Table 4 illustrates the results of the comparative statistical analyses between the ASD and control groups based on the same three features for the synthesis tasks (see our preliminary analysis in [39]). As can be seen from this table, there was no significant difference between the ASD and controlgroup participants in terms of the mean fixation duration for the synthesis tasks.…”