The Effect of Dyslexia on Searching Visual and Textual Content: Are Icons Really Useful?

Abstract

Abstract.Little is known about how dyslexia affects online information seeking. This study addresses the search performance of 21 users with dyslexia and 21 controls in textual versus visual displays. The aim was to investigate whether visual content enhance search performance. Participants were presented with 24 icons and 24 words and asked to locate a target item. Eye-tracking data revealed no differences in performance in visual or textual content in the dyslexia group. There were no significant differences between the user groups on visual tasks. However, users with dyslexia performed significantly slower on textual tasks than controls, mainly due to longer fixation durations. Users in the control group took much less time solving textual tasks than visual tasks. The results indicate that there may be no advantages in replacing textual content with icons for users with dyslexia. However, replacing text with icons may be counterproductive for users without dyslexia.

Image Search Versus Text Search Revisited: A Simple Experiment Using a Kahoot Quiz

“…It is useful from a practical perspective that users' preferences are consistent with performance characteristics, that is, for the types of search studied users prefer the search modes with the shortest task completion times and lowest error rate. Although generalizable, the benefit of image search is not suitable for all users [17,28,29]. The convention of redundant coding where image is used together with text and other characteristics seems sensible [26,27].…”

“…Icons, images, and text has also been studied in context of disability. For instance, researchers have explored whether icons are more effective than text for users with dyslexia [28] and for users with a diagnosis on the autism spectrum [29].…”