Why the article is helpful
- Quantified accessibility results for the WWW applications and user behavior, specifically for blind users
- Differences in hypertext navigation and eye-movements
- Users heavily rely on scanning navigation instead of logical navigation
In this article, the authors quantified the navigation accessibility results for world wide web applications and user behavior for blind users and non-visual users. It discussed difficulty non-visual users have with current site structure despite using their assistive tools. One of the goals for this study was to discover the various scanning methods, and measure their frequencies. As a result, the authors found that users heavily rely on user scanning navigation instead of logical navigation and proposed a new, landmark based navigation structure to assist blind users with orienting and navigating a site.
Additional details
Findings include the need to:
- Increase the number of useful landmarks
- Improve HTML specification
- Improve voice browsers to support users to learn appropriate navigation methods for each page they access
Links to article
Takagi, H., Saito, S., Fukuda, K., & Asakawa, C. (2007). Analysis of navigability of web applications for improving blind usability. ACM Transactions Computer-Human Interaction, 14(3), 13. doi:10.1145/1279700.1279703