Personalized Assistive Web for Improving Mobile Web Browsing and Accessibility for Visually Impaired Users

Abstract

Mobile web browsing has become a daily routine for many people, including those with visual impairments. However, usability and accessibility challenges of mobile handheld devices may compromise the benefits of mobile web access, particularly for users with visual impairments. To improve mobile web accessibility, we propose a Personalized Assistive Web (PAW) that aims to improve skimming in mobile web browsing for users with visual impairments through hierarchical outline view and personalization adaptations in this research. We empirically evaluated PAW via a controlled lab experiment with 21 blind participants and 34 sighted participants. The empirical results provide strong evidence for the positive impacts of the hierarchical outline view adaptation on user performance of information search (i.e., search time) and perceptions (i.e., perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness) across the two groups of participants and demonstrate that the positive effects of adaptation personalization vary with participants. The findings not only demonstrate the effectiveness of the hierarchical outline view adaptation for blind and sighted participants but also reveal some important similarities and interesting differences in the effect of personalized adaptation between the two groups of participants. This research provides design and technical insights that are instrumental for improving mobile web accessibility.