Work

Enhancing Revisitation in Touchscreen Reading for Visually Impaired People with Semantic Navigation Design

Year: 2022

Type: article

Abstract: Revisitation, the process of non-linearly returning to previously visited regions, is an important task in academic reading. However, listening to content on mobile phones via a screen reader fails to support eyes-free revisiting due to its linear audio stream, ineffective text organization, and inaccessible interaction. To enhance the efficiency and experience of eyes-free revisiting, we identified visually impaired people's behaviors and difficulties during text revisiting through a survey (N=37) and an observation study (N=12). We proposed a series of design guidelines targeting high precision, high flexibility, and low workload in interaction, and iteratively designed and developed a reading prototype application. Our implementation supports dynamic text structure and is supplemented by both linear and non-linear layered text navigation. The evaluation results (N=8) show that compared to existing methods, our prototype improves the clarity of text understanding and fluency of revisiting with reduced workload.

Source: Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive Mobile Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies

DOI: 10.1145/3550290

Authors: Zhichun Li, Yu Jiang, Xiaochen Liu, Yuhang Zhao, Chun Yu, Yuanchun Shi

Institutions: Tsinghua University, University of California San Diego, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Language: English

Topic: Digital Accessibility for Disabilities

Subfield: Human Factors and Ergonomics

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funders: National Natural Science Foundation of China, Tsinghua University, National Key Research and Development Program of China

Awards: G356654689, G6243391630, G8361467185