Help-Seeking Situations Related to Visual Interactions on Mobile Platforms and Recommended Designs for Blind and Visually Impaired Users
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Literature Review
2.1. BVI Users’ Help-Seeking Situations Related to Visual Interactions
2.2. Design Issues and Solutions
3. Materials and Methods
3.1. Sampling
3.2. Data Collection
3.3. Data Analysis
4. Results
4.1. Categories of Help-Seeking Situations
4.2. Typical Help-Seeking Situations Related to Visual Interactions in Mobile Environments
4.2.1. Features/Elements: Difficulty Finding a Toggle-Based Search Feature
“I don’t know if that’s like a search. Ohh, I guess it’s a search, but it’s not really a button. Let’s see a search toggle. I don’t really understand what that means. Ohh so I guess the search toggle brings up the search bar and then then you have a text field that wasn’t … really sure what search toggle meant. I’ve never heard that before, so now I’m in the search field. Umm, OK cool. So let me just try. Uh. I don’t know. I just wanna see how it works when you search for something.”(IP5-LD)
“I wish that the search field was not hidden behind the button because if I’m learning of this page… But if I’m loading up this page and I want to jump straight to the search field. … See, I can’t find the text field.”(IP29-LH)
4.2.2. Features/Elements: Difficulty Understanding a Video Feature
“I’m noticing is it’s a little bit verbose, so it’s not properly tagged. So, it’s telling me and, you know, a bunch of numbers and what have you. It doesn’t really make sense from a screen reader point of view. So, OK, it’s telling me that there is a video thumbnail. OK, there is a button for play clip. Alright, so there is a slider. I’m not sure if that works or not, but I’ll just flick past that….”(AP14-OL)
4.2.3. Features/Elements: Difficulty Navigating Items on Paginated Sections
“The tabs inside of the collection are also not accessible, so there are tabs over here. There’s one that’s selected, and it’s an unlabeled tab. The second one is not selected, third one, fourth one. At least I know that there are tabs here, but it doesn’t tell me what those tabs are.”(ID17-LO)
4.2.4. Features/Elements: Difficulty Distinguishing Collection Labels from Thumbnail Descriptions
“It doesn’t act like there’s a break between the description and what the category is…this one says white button with blue and red lettering politics explore so politics. But it’s not pausing to tell me it’s politics. It just runs it all through like it’s one word or like it’s one sentence. It’s so it’s some of these, it’s actually hard to tell what the category is because the category name fits into the sentence.”(AT24-ML)
4.2.5. Content: Difficulty Recognizing the Content of Images
“Umm, oh, that’s the image there, but the only thing my VoiceOver said was the word armed. It just said like war dogs for armed forces image. And then it said armed. That’s all it says.”(ID10-AL)
4.2.6. Content: Difficulty Recognizing the Content of Graphs
“So, the first item that I think of will be a graph. However, this graph lacks a description. I can’t fully interpret because they’re just saying that these are graphs.”(AT18-OL)
“I can’t understand it. So, the description of it says that it’s a chart that shows forces, position, and velocity, but when I go into it, it’s not understandable.”(AP15-LO)
4.2.7. Structure: Difficulty Interacting with Multilayered Windows
“I’m doing filtering…I wanted my filter…I wanna go to the other search…I went down to the bottom to touch on search. … I’m going back to my advance and I want to I wanna see. OK, I want to see. Umm. No, I took it out. I went back to my filters and it took my words.”(AP7-LA)
5. Discussion
5.1. Theoretical Implications
5.2. Practical Implications
6. Conclusions
Author Contributions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
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Category | Number of Participants | |
---|---|---|
Age | 18–29 | 29 |
30–39 | 41 | |
40–49 | 27 | |
50–59 | 13 | |
>59 | 10 | |
Gender | Female | 60 |
Male | 59 | |
Non-binary | 1 | |
Race | White | 54 |
Black | 24 | |
Asian or Pacific Islander | 19 | |
Hispanic or Latino | 12 | |
Other | 11 | |
Education | High school and Associate | 30 |
Bachelor | 46 | |
Master | 33 | |
Doctoral or professional degree | 8 | |
Prefer not to answer | 3 | |
Vision condition | Blind | 80 |
Visually impaired | 40 |
Task Type | Task Duration | Example (DL: Task Information) |
---|---|---|
Orientation task | 10 min | LoC, DPLA, HathiTrust, ArtStor, OER Commons, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture: You will have 10 min to explore the features and functions of this digital library. Please talk continuously about your thoughts and actions in relation to your interactions with the digital library during this task including its structure, features, content, format, search results, etc. Please specify your intentions for each action, the problems you encountered, and your solutions. |
Specific search | 15 min | ArtStor: Find a World War II poster on war dogs in 1943. Find out the name of the repository that houses it. What were the two figures portrayed in the poster? |
Exploratory search | 15 min | OER Commons: Find interactive items or graphics related to relationships between position, velocity, and acceleration. Each should represent different formats (e.g., interactive item, image, and text) or content (e.g., the relationship between velocity and acceleration, the relationship between position and velocity) of this search topic. |
Category | Type of Situations | Definition |
---|---|---|
Features/elements | Difficulty finding a toggle-based search feature | A situation that arises when BVI users have difficulty finding a search box due to the unrecognizable toggle-based search feature. |
Difficulty understanding a video feature | A situation that arises from difficulty interpreting the functionality of or executing a video-related feature due to inappropriate labeling. | |
Difficulty navigating items on paginated sections | A situation that arises from difficulty selecting an item on paginated sections due to inappropriate labels of active elements. | |
Difficulty distinguishing collection labels from thumbnail descriptions | A situation that arises from difficulty recognizing and comprehending collection titles due to the unseparated collection titles and ALT text for thumbnails. | |
Content | Difficulty recognizing the content of images | A situation arises from difficulty obtaining details of images due to a lack of support for providing specifics of images. |
Difficulty recognizing the content of graphs | A situation that arises from difficulty obtaining details of graphs due to a lack of support for providing specifics of graphs. | |
Structure | Difficulty interacting with multilayered windows | A situation that arises from difficulty focusing on an active window due to the poor design of pop-up windows. |
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Share and Cite
Xie, I.; Choi, W.; Wang, S.; Lee, H.S.; Hong, B.H.; Wang, N.-C.; Cudjoe, E.K. Help-Seeking Situations Related to Visual Interactions on Mobile Platforms and Recommended Designs for Blind and Visually Impaired Users. J. Imaging 2024, 10, 205. https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging10080205
Xie I, Choi W, Wang S, Lee HS, Hong BH, Wang N-C, Cudjoe EK. Help-Seeking Situations Related to Visual Interactions on Mobile Platforms and Recommended Designs for Blind and Visually Impaired Users. Journal of Imaging. 2024; 10(8):205. https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging10080205
Chicago/Turabian StyleXie, Iris, Wonchan Choi, Shengang Wang, Hyun Seung Lee, Bo Hyun Hong, Ning-Chiao Wang, and Emmanuel Kwame Cudjoe. 2024. "Help-Seeking Situations Related to Visual Interactions on Mobile Platforms and Recommended Designs for Blind and Visually Impaired Users" Journal of Imaging 10, no. 8: 205. https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging10080205