Abstract
This study was conducted to understand how key stakeholders perceive the importance of design guidelines that specifically target the needs of blind and visually impaired (BVI) digital library (DL) users. An in-depth survey questionnaire was distributed among 150 participants representing three stakeholder groups: BVI users, DL developers, and scholars/experts. Participants were informed about different help-seeking situations that BVI users encountered when interacting with a DL non-visually using screen readers. They were then presented with a set of design guidelines to address each situation. Finally, they were asked to rate the importance of each set of guidelines in remediating each corresponding situation. Both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis were applied to analyze the data. The results show that all key stakeholders agree it is critical to develop DL design guidelines to support BVI users. On the one hand, the three groups share some similarities in rating the importance of guidelines for these help-seeking situations; on the other hand, the disparities mainly lie in the fact that DL developers and the scholars/experts focused more on the guidelines addressing the accessibility-related situations, while BVI users emphasized that DL design guidelines need to take into consideration both accessibility and usability-related situations.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Leuthold, S., Bargas-Avila, J.A., Opwis, K.: Beyond Web content accessibility guidelines: design of enhanced text user interfaces for blind internet users. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. 66(4), 257–270 (2008)
Xie, I., Babu, R., Castillo, M.D., Han, H.: Identification of factors associated with blind users’ help-seeking situations in interacting with digital libraries. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 69(4), 514–527 (2018)
Power, C., Freire, A., Petrie, H., Swallow, D.: Guidelines are only half of the story: accessibility problems encountered by blind users on the web. In: CHI’12 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 433–442. ACM, New York (2012)
Rømen, D., Svanæs, D.: Validating WCAG versions 1.0 and 2.0 through usability testing with disabled users. Univ. Access Inf. Soc. 11(4), 375–385(2012)
Borodin, Y., Bigham, J.P., Dausch, G., Ramakrishnan, I.V.: More than meets the eye: a survey of screen-reader browsing strategies. In: Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, pp. 1–10. ACM, New York (2010)
Lazar, J., Allen, A., Kleinman, J., Malarkey, C.: What frustrates screen reader users on the web: a study of 100 blind users. Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 22(3), 247–269 (2007)
Xie, I., Babu, R., Joo, S., Fuller, P.: Using digital libraries non-visually: understanding the help-seeking situations of blind users. Inf. Res. 20(2), n2 (2015)
Spina, C.: WCAG 2.1 and the current state of web accessibility in libraries. Weave J. Libr. User Exp. 2(2) (2019). https://doi.org/10.3998/weave.12535642.0002.202
Calvo, R., Seyedarabi, F., Savva, A.: Beyond web content accessibility guidelines: expert accessibility reviews. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion, pp. 77–84. ACM, New York (2016)
Clegg-Vinell, R., Bailey, C., Gkatzidou, V.: Investigating the appropriateness and relevance of mobile web accessibility guidelines. In: Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference, pp. 1–4. ACM, New York (2014)
Reid, L., Snow-Weaver, A.: WCAG 2.0: A web accessibility standard for the evolving web. In: Proceedings of the 2008 International Cross-disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, pp. 109–115. ACM, New York (2008)
Termens, M., Ribera, M., Porras, M., Boldú, M., Sulé, A., Paris, P.: Web content accessibility guidelines: From 1.0 to 2.0. In: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 1171–1172. ACM, New York (2009)
Schmutz, S., Sonderegger, A., Sauer, J.: Implementing recommendations from web accessibility guidelines: a comparative study of nondisabled users and users with visual impairments. Hum. Factors J. Hum. Factors Ergon. Soc. 59(6), 956–972 (2017)
Cooper, M.: Web accessibility guidelines for the 2020s. In: Proceedings of the 13th Web for all Conference, pp. 1–4. ACM, New York (2016)
Acknowledgements
The authors thank IMLS Leadership Grants for Libraries for funding for this project.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Xie, I., Babu, R., Wang, S., Lee, T.H., Lee, H.S. (2021). Importance of Digital Library Design Guidelines to Support Blind and Visually Impaired Users: Perceptions of Key Stakeholders. In: Toeppe, K., Yan, H., Chu, S.K.W. (eds) Diversity, Divergence, Dialogue. iConference 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12646. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71305-8_39
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71305-8_39
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-71304-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-71305-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)