CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 28Digital Accessibility for DisabilitiesUsability and User Interface DesignAssistive Technology in Communication and Mobility

“Every Website Is a Puzzle!” : Facilitating Access to Common Website Features for People with Visual Impairments

Open access
Barbosa, Natã M., Hayes, Jordan, Kaushik, Smirity, Wang, Yang·2022·ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing
DOI 10.1145/3519032
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Navigating unfamiliar websites is challenging for users with visual impairments. Although many websites offer visual cues to facilitate access to pages/features most websites are expected to have (e.g., log in at the top right), such visual shortcuts are not accessible to users with visual impairments. Moreover, although such pages serve the same functionality across websites (e.g., to log in, to sign up), the location, wording, and navigation path of links to these pages vary from one website to another. Such inconsistencies are challenging for users with visual impairments, especially for users of screen readers, who often need to linearly listen to content of pages to figure out how to access certain website features. To study how to improve access to main website features, we iteratively designed and tested a command-based approach for main features of websites via a browser extension powered by machine learning and human input. The browser extension gives users a way to access high-level website features (e.g., log in, find stores, contact) via keyboard commands. We tested the browser extension in a lab setting with 15 Internet users, including 9 users with visual impairments and 6 without. Our study showed that commands for main website features can greatly improve the experience of users with visual impairments. People without visual impairments also found command-based access helpful when visiting unfamiliar, cluttered, or infrequently visited websites, suggesting that this approach can support users with visual impairments while also benefiting other user groups (i.e., universal design). Our study reveals concerns about the handling of unsupported commands and the availability and trustworthiness of human input. We discuss how websites, browsers, and assistive technologies could incorporate a command-based paradigm to enhance web accessibility and provide more consistency on the web to benefit users with varied abilities when navigating unfamiliar or complex websites.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3519032

Cites

52 of 52 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 18

  1. [3]3. Tousif Ahmed, Patrick Shaffer, Kay Connelly, David Crandall, and Apu Kapadia. 2016. Addressing physical safety, security, and privacy for people with visual impairments. In Proceedings of the 12th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS'16). 341-354.
  2. [11]11. Gabriel Barata, Tiago Guerreiro, and Daniel Gonçalves. 2009. Blaze: Automating User Interaction in Graphical User Interfaces. Ph.D. Dissertation. Instituto Superior Técnico.
  3. [13]13. Jeffrey P. Bigham, Tessa Lau, and Jeffrey Nichols. 2009. Trailblazer: Enabling blind users to blaze trails through the web. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. ACM, New York, NY, 177-186.
  4. [16]16. Yevgen Borodin, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Rohit Raman, and I. V. Ramakrishnan. 2008. What's new? Making web page up- dates accessible. In Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. 145-152.
  5. [17]17. Erin Brady, Jeffrey P. Bigham, et al. 2015. Crowdsourcing accessibility: Human-powered access technologies. Founda- tions and Trends® in Human-Computer Interaction 8, 4 (2015), 273-372.
  6. [21]21. T. B. Dinesh, S. Uskudarli, Subramanya Sastry, Deepti Aggarwal, and Venkatesh Choppella. 2012. Alipi: A framework for re-narrating web pages. In Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility. 1-4.
  7. [26]26. Eelke Folmer, Bei Yuan, Dave Carr, and Manjari Sapre. 2009. TextSL: A command-based virtual world interface for the visually impaired. In Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. ACM, New York, NY, 59-66.
  8. [27]27. Johannes Fürnkranz. 1999. Exploiting structural information for text classification on the WWW. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis. 487-497.
  9. [31]31. Jordan Hayes, Smirity Kaushik, Charlotte Emily Price, and Yang Wang. 2019. Cooperative privacy and security: Learn- ing from people with visual impairments and their allies. In Proceedings of the 15th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS'19).
  10. [40]40. Gilly Leshed, Eben M. Haber, Tara Matthews, and Tessa Lau. 2008. CoScripter: Automating and sharing how-to knowl- edge in the enterprise. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, NY, 1719-1728.
  11. [44]44. Jalal U. Mahmud, Yevgen Borodin, and I. V. Ramakrishnan. 2007. CSurf: A context-driven non-visual web-browser. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web. ACM, New York, NY, 31-40.
  12. [54]54. Mark A. Rosso. 2008. User-based identification of web genres. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59, 7 (2008), 1053-1072.
  13. [56]56. Nuzhah Gooda Sahib. 2011. Investigating the information seeking behaviour of blind searchers on the web. In Pro- ceedings of the 25th BCS Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. 558-560.
  14. [62]62. Edward Steinfeld. 1994. The concept of universal design. In Proceedings of the 6th Ibero-American Conference on Acces- sibility.
  15. [64]64. Markus Strohmaier, Mathias Lux, Michael Granitzer, Peter Scheir, Sotirios Liaskos, and Eric Yu. 2007. How do users ex- press goals on the web? An exploration of intentional structures in web search. In Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE'07). 67-78.
  16. [67]67. Hironobu Takagi, Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Takashi Itoh, and Chieko Asakawa. 2008. Social accessi- bility: Achieving accessibility through collaborative metadata authoring. In Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. ACM, New York, NY, 193-200.
  17. [72]72. Thijs Westerveld, Wessel Kraaij, and Djoerd Hiemstra. 2001. Retrieving web pages using content, links, URLs and anchors. In Proceedings of the 10th Text Retrieval Conference (TREC'01), Vol. 1. 663-672.
  18. [75]75. Sven Meyer Zu Eissen and Benno Stein. 2004. Genre classification of web pages. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 256-269.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Barbosa, N. M., Hayes, J., Kaushik, S., & Wang, Y.
Affiliations
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
  • Syracuse University (US)
ORCID
Venue
ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Published
2022-07-08
Volume
15
Issue
3
Pages
1-35
ISSN
  • 1936-7228 (ISSN-L)
  • 1936-7236
DOI
10.1145/3519032
OpenAlex
W4221084568
Cited by
28
References
52
Citations by year
2026: 4 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 5
FWCI
15.28
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Background (vor)
Locations
ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (publishedVersion)
Funders
  • National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (90DP0061-01-00)
  • National Science Foundation (CNS-1652497)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Human Factors and Ergonomics › Digital Accessibility for Disabilities
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Usability and User Interface Design
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › Occupational Therapy › Assistive Technology in Communication and Mobility
Keywords
web accessibility, visual impairment, screen readers, web navigation, browser extension, machine learning, human input, universal design, assistive technology

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review