WebSight: The use of the grid-based interface to convey layout of web-pages in a non-visual environment

Abstract

Accessing Web content including lay out of web pages is currently limited for sight-impaired people. In general, Internet content is designed with sighted users in mind, requiring users without this ability to adapt (Edwards, 1994). The non-visual interaction methods presented by Screen Readers are often serial in nature and laborious. In this paper we introduce the design and evaluation of WebSight, a talking browser that conveys layouts of Web pages for the blind. WebSight is a plug-in for Internet Explorer and employs a universal 3X3 grid-based interface (Kamel, 2002), to assist blind people with visualizing Web content with respect to its absolute and relative positions. Each cell of the grid contains a 3X3 virtual sub-grid with nine unique positions. We conducted an experiment involving six blind and six sighted navigating a layout of a particular webpage. The study reveals that the use of absolute and relative position coupled with a grid-based interface enable blind users to build mental model of page layout at least as well as sighted users. In addition, findings of the study suggest that the grid-based interface is a universal mechanism that enhances the process of building mental models of layout designs. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.