Understanding Blind and Low Vision Users' Attitudes Towards Spatial Interactions in Desktop Screen Readers

Abstract

Desktop screen readers as a web navigation mechanism for BLV users are tedious and frozen in time, especially in the face of richer ways of presenting spatial information such as tactile and touchscreen devices. In our work, we consider what it means to create and evaluate systems that can present a similarly rich, spatial interaction mechanism plugged into existing screen reader paradigms. We present a formative study conducted with SpaceNav, a custom screen reader that utilizes spatial input and output to navigate two different web applications. We present results from this study, and discuss a new browser extension we are implementing based on our formative study feedback to more robustly test spatial interactions in the context of real world websites. To close, we describe our goals for evaluating the new web extension in a future study.

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