Section 3: What did we do

About this section

This section provides a basic description of our research. Besides the problems which have been discussed in section 1, we wanted to get a better understanding of the problems related to blind website navigation and possible solutions for these problems. A prototype was developed and evaluated, and three ‘challenge focus areas’ were specified.

Blind navigation

To understand how blind users navigate, it is interesting to understand the way blind people travel in general. Some characteristics of this form of travel are:

Navigation is divided into a large number of small steps, each of a low level of complexity. After each step there is a phase of reorientation.

When traveling, most blind people will 'probe' the environment in the direction they are moving. This way, relevant landmarks which lie ahead can be detected and anticipated. Such landmarks can be either cues (landmarks aiding travel, such as a skip link pointing to the start of a page's main content) or obstacles (landmarks inhibiting travel, such as an inaccessible multimedia object). A successful journey is one where cues can be maximized and obstacles minimized.

Research setup

Findings

Findings regarding prototype

The main idea behind the prototype was that offering an the website's overall structure would improve website navigation for blind users. However, the results showed that having a second interface was confusing for the participants. Second, the participants were not interested in building a mental model of the site as a whole. The reason for this was that they already needed to focus on the 'one page at a time' issues. In other words, providing a second 'view' of the website led to cognitive overload.

Using sounds to provide preview information was also considered distractive, as participants already had to use the auditory channel to interpret the screen reader's speech. The preview information itself was considered useful.

Other ‘peripheral’ functionality, such as the identification of main links or the ‘one-hand’ interface’ was considered to be useful as well.

To conclude: Offering a separate interface to a website’s overall structure does not improve website navigation for blind users.

Findings regarding blind navigation

Successful site navigation largely depends on whether or not the user is successful in exploring the website during an initial 'learning phase'. During this learning phase the user attempts to locate useful landmarks on the website, which can then be used in subsequent visits to the site for more efficient and effective navigation. For example, during the observation sessions one participant visited a website where a person's address can be found based on last name and city. The page containing search results was tedious to navigate through because the participant had to listen through a lot of irrelevant content such as menus, banners and additional lines before even arriving at the actual search results. So instead of having to listen through all this information on each visit, the particpant had memorized that the actual search results always started after the words 'search in this city’s surroundings', because this link happened to be located just before the results. This way the participant had created a landmark that could be used on future visits (using the browser's 'find' function) to jump directly to the relevant location on the page.

In this learning phase, blind users create alternative navigation paths, so that they only have to deal with the site content relevant to the task they want to perform. All other information can then be discarded, so that the cognitive load will be kept to a minimum.

To be able to deal with excessive quantities of page content, blind users will try to filter information. Users of screenreader software will use the link list (a list containing all present links on the page), or use heading navigation to quickly scan the page structure.

Based on the results mentioned above, three focus areas have been specified which will be discussed. These focus areas are broad topic areas of website navigation issues for blind users.

Focus areas

Focus area 1: providing guidance

In real life, one can take a blind person by the hand to guide him or her, describing what a room looks like, what can be found in the room and what can be done in the room.

The same can be done virtually. Often the blind user is forced to listen through half a page before being able to determine whether it is relevant. A solution is needed that will provide the user with summary information about the current website as well as the current web page. Also, what can be done on the page should be mentioned, as well as the steps required to complete the possible actions.

Recommendations for focus area 1

The user must be provided preview information of link targets. On a basic level, blind user navigation consists of a sequence of steps, through which the user explores a virtual environment. If the step taken seems to be correct, the user will continue from this point, if not, the user will backtrack to the previous point. In complex website structures this trial and error approach can be tedious and time consuming, especially when the user is forced to try out certain steps due to a lack of or unclear description of a specific link’s target. Providing preview information will assist the user in deciding whether the link is worth following or not.

The user should have access to the main architecture of the website. In order to provide a limited form of overview on a website, the user should have access to the main categories in which a site’s structure is divided. This overview knowledge can be useful to point the user in the right direction (i.e. the right ‘section’ of a website), and allows the user to directly jump from one site category to the next. This main structure can be based on link statistics analysis (i.e. calculating which pages are linked to most often from other pages within the site), but should also include further advanced analysis of the content and structure of a website. For instance, certain pages which contain peripheral information such as disclaimers are generally linked relatively often in a website, but should not be identified as a main category. The site categories should be accessible separately from the main site’s interface, providing a separate site menu list which does not necessarily have to represent the categorization intended by the web designer. A link list would be a suitable interface to the main information architecture, accessible either through a shortcut or embedded in the existing link list interface provided by the user’s screen reader.

Focus area 2: empowering users

The current research has shown that blind Internet users are very resourceful in dealing with complex sites. They identify landmarks that can be used to skip to relevant content, and are able to determine which steps are necessary to reach a certain goal. Rather than providing guidance through a website's structure, solutions should act as additional tools which empower users to navigate more successfully.

Recommendations for focus area 2

The user should have more ‘undo’ power. It is easy for a blind person to become lost or disoriented while trying to form a path to a specific goal. Either the most recent steps chosen prove to be incorrect (forcing the user to backtrack several steps), or the user loses track on his or her current location within the site and specific page (causing the user to lose the path). Even when the browser’s back function is used it does not always mean the user is automatically returned to the last known position on that previous page. Users should be provided with more functionality that allows them to explore possible paths while minimizing the risk of becoming lost.

The user should with external memory to store gained knowledge gained during a learning phase. When a user discovers how a specific task (for instance logging into a site, or looking up a certain item in a database) is performed during a learning phase, this task can still be tedious to repeat during succeeding visits. An example is a task which spans multiple complex pages, containing landmarks that are not easy to remember. The agent should be aware of this process, and allow the user to store the gained knowledge during this learning phase. This way, the user will no longer be forced to memorize relevant landmarks.

Focus area 3: reducing cognitive overload

A major problem regarding website navigation by blind Internet users is having to deal with an overflow of information, of which a relatively large part is not relevant to the user’s goals. Such an overload can cause both problems regarding the effectiveness (the user will lose track and become disoriented) and efficiency (navigation is time consuming and tedious to perform) of user navigation. While sighted users can ignore information by scanning, blind users must rely on different techniques to filter out the relevant from the irrelevant content. A navigation tool should therefore aid the user in reducing the amount of information which has to be read through.

Recommendations for focus area 3

Large pages are difficult to navigate due to cognitive overloading. The user should be provided with the means to have this content shrink to a more manageable size, in order to be able to work with it.

Providing context information about currently selected link. Navigating through the use of link lists causes a link to be isolated from its context, and can consequently be more difficult to interpret. Links which contain the same title but occur in different sentences will sound as duplicates in a link list, even though they have different targets. By parsing a document’s source code and determining whether the link is surrounded by textual content, the agent can attempt to determine a logical starting and end point by which the context should be bounded, such as the use of periods and capital letters to identify sentences.

Links should be categorized based on relevance, type, or subject category. A large set of links can be easier to navigate through when grouped into more manageable categories. Ideally, these categories are created through clustering methods which extract significant keywords for each page within a site, allowing the agent to group the links on a page based on similarities between their target page’s keyword descriptions. However for this approach to be effective it is necessary for these categories to actually make sense, which cannot be guaranteed using an automated approach on diverse material found on WWW sites. Another useful categorization would be based on which links are relevant to the user’s goal, as interpreted by the agent. For this to work the agent must posses a correct understanding of what the user is looking for, as well as an understanding of what the link targets are about. A third approach to link categorization is by their function within the website’s structure. Some links are part of the website’s main information architecture, while other links lead to more peripheral information (such as site configuration or disclaimers).

When visiting a page, the agent should allow the user to directly skip to relevant content. Most websites consist of pages which have a navigation section (usually a menu of some sort) and page specific content. The navigation generally remains consistent up to certain extent during site navigation, while the page related content (which in essence ‘is’ the page) is what the user is looking for (either in order to decide which step to take next, or because the page content contains the user’s final goal). The user agent should be able to recognize which code belongs to the navigation content and which code belongs to the page related content, allowing the user to directly jump to the relevant part of the page.