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

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.