Analysis of navigation behaviour of blind users using Browsing Shortcuts

Abstract

The World Wide Web is today the largest information seeking environment. Millions of people use it to satisfy their information needs. Although it is quite easy for able-bodied users to use it, there are still a lot of problems for people with disabilities. A major group of them are blind users. Blind users navigate the web in a different and less effective and efficient way especially when it comes to information seeking tasks. To ease the problem we introduced the Browsing Shortcuts (BSs) mechanism to enable blind people to move efficiently to various elements of a web page (e.g. functional elements such as forms, navigational aids, etc.), hence operating effectively as an interaction method and a vital counterbalance to low navigability of web pages. Although there are proofs that navigation performance was improved using the BSs mechanism, this effect had never been examined and explained in detail. In this paper, we re-analyse data collected from past experiments and review BSs usage from a navigation behaviour perspective. This is achieved by a new analysis using a visualisation method of “travel graphs” for studying the navigation methods of blind users. We compare behaviours of blind users using the BSs feature to the ones used without it to determine changes in behaviour. The basic aim behind this analysis is to examine how BSs have affected the navigation behaviour of blind users. We wished to determine how non-visual navigation using BSs assists users in parsing a web page into functional or semantic regions. Additionally, we wished to examine if and how these regions are accessed during an information seeking episode with and without the BSs mechanism. Finally, we wished to examine whether these changes are towards more rationalised information seeking behaviour. In overall, this new analysis of the recorded results indicate that the navigation model using BSs signifies more rationalised navigation and significantly change information seeking behaviour improving both navigability and information seeking performance.

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