Course:LIBR559A/Lazar, J, Allen A, Kleinman, J., & Malarkey, C. (2007)

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Citation

Jonathan Lazar , Aaron Allen , Jason Kleinman & Chris Malarkey (2007) 'What Frustrates Screen Reader Users on the Web: A Study of 100 Blind Users, International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 22:3, 247-269, DOI: 10.1080/10447310709336964

Annotation

Dr. J. Lazar is a professor and founder of the Universal Usability Laboratory at Towson University. He has expertise and a multitude of publications including articles and books on human-computer interaction, accessibility and usability for people with disabilities. He takes a user-centered design approach to include users with disabilities in the design and development of web content.

In this article, Lazar reports on one of his studies investigating usability with screen readers(SR) for people with visual disabilities (pvds). He begins with an introduction to the issue, explaining that screen readers, applications that convert web content into speech, are the most used assistive technology by pvds, and that they are a priority concern in the design of usable websites. Then he makes the point that users with disabilities are a large customer base in information technology. For a company such as Microsoft, they account for millions among their user base. Next he points out that there have not been many research studies focusing on blind users that have had sufficient numbers of users taking part, explaining the need for the study he conducted. Then he goes on to describe his study: One hundred blind individuals were asked to record their frustrations when browsing the web using screen readers. They used a diary to record the problems that caused them frustration, along with the impact of these problems on their mood and their ability to get work done in a timely manner. The study found that the top most frequent problems causing frustration included conflict between SR and webpage, unlabeled forms, no alt text for picture, and screen reader crashes. Based on these findings, Lazar concludes that causes of frustration can be seen as a ‘to-do’ list for web designers, and argues that these problems are easy to solve with relatively quick fixes. Finally, he calls for designers to involve users with visual disabilities in the design process to discover such problems, and to “take the lead in building usable websites for pvds”.

The article begins with a good overview of issues related to web usability for pvds. It is a good starting point for a librarian beginning to investigate options for improving web usability for pvds. However, this particular study asks pvds to “browse the web for two hours”, not specifying which type of organization or website its findings would apply to. Therefore, it is only meant to be a general first step and its ‘to-do’ list is not applicable to any specific case. It is more of a general call for Human-Computer Interaction researchers, and anyone designing web content for users (including librarians), to follow Lazar’s lead and continue to conduct studies investigating pvds’ perspectives and needsin order to “take the lead in building usable websites for pvds”.

References

Lazar, J. (Ed.). (2007). Universal usability: Designing computer interfaces for diverse user populations. John Wiley & Sons.

Homepage of Dr. Jonathan Lazar. (d.d.). Retrieved June 09, 2017, from http://orion.towson.edu/~jlazar/

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