Designing a Web Page Considering the Interaction Characteristics of the Hard-of-Hearing

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to report a case study involving the successful redesigning of a Web page that was problematic for the hard-of-hearing. We found in our previous eye-tracking studies [1,2,3] that the page in question presented serious usability problems for the hard-of-hearing. Namely, the performance of hard-of-hearing participants was inferior to that of the hearing in terms of the following four performance measures: 1) scan patterns, 2) the number of errors and the time necessary to select the correct link, 3) the amount of time necessary to select a link, and 4) the types of selected links. We conjectured that these differences occurred because the informational organization of the original Web page was difficult for the hard-of-hearing to understand. Considering the Web interaction characteristics of the hard-of-hearing, we redesigned the page in two ways: 1) adding vertical lines that should function as visual support enabling the hard-of-hearing to grasp the informational structure easily, and 2) replacing difficult-to-understand labels with comprehensible representations. Observation of eye movements for the redesigned page revealed that the abovementioned differences disappeared, indicating that the redesign was successful. We believe that this case study exemplifies the successful redesigning of Web pages to make them more accessible to hard-of-hearing users.