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Usability testing with screen reading technology in a Windows environment

Published: 01 November 2000 Publication History

Abstract

Ever since applications with graphical user interfaces were introduced, individuals who are blind have experienced great difficulty accessing these applications. The quality of access provided through a combination of screen reading software and speech synthesizer is greatly dependent on the design of the mainstream application interface. In attempt to better understand the access strategies employed by users of screen readers, this study was designed to (a) examine the interaction between users of screen reading technology and graphical user interface (GUI) elements and (b) to identify the type and significance of obstacles encountered during these interactions. Fifty-eight unique obstacles encountered by participants were identified. These obstacles were encountered by the thirteen participants a total 534 times. Although many obstacles lead to minor delays, the cumulative effect of these obstacles was to significantly delay, and in many cases, prevent task completion.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CUU '00: Proceedings on the 2000 conference on Universal Usability
November 2000
165 pages
ISBN:1581133146
DOI:10.1145/355460
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 01 November 2000

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Author Tags

  1. GUI
  2. blindness
  3. disability
  4. screen reader

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CUU00
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CUU00: ACM Conference on Universal Usability
November 16 - 17, 2000
Virginia, Arlington, USA

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