Preliminary Evaluation of Interactive Search Engine Interface for Visually Impaired Users

TL;DR

This paper presents a new interactive search engine interface for visually impaired users, evaluated for usability and accessibility, combining Formal Concept Analysis with interactive navigation to improve search efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interface called InteractSE that integrates Formal Concept Analysis with context navigation, enhancing web search for visually impaired users.

Findings

Most usability problems had minor severity ratings.

Nielsen heuristics and WCAG 2.0 guidelines together identified more issues.

The interface improved search efficiency for VI users.

Abstract

This work designs, evaluates, and improves a proposed search engine interface for Visually Impaired VI users to efficiently perform web search activities. Our conceptual modeling technique is based on Formal Concept Analysis FCA that is used for data analysis. This approach highlights the hierarchized approach to represent the discovered concepts. It is combined with context interactive navigation in an interface which is called interactive search engine (InteractSE). This interface aims to reduce the time and effort required by the VI users to browse search results. InteractSE was evaluated by experts using Nielsen heuristics and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 2.0 for its usability and accessibility. The analysis was carried out based on the usability problems identified and their average severity ratings. The results show that the most frequently violated heuristics from Nielsen set are consistency, documentation, and the average severity rating of all the problems is minor. The results also show that the most frequently violated WCAG 2 guidelines are distinguishable, followed by navigable and affordance. The average severity rating of all the problems found using WCAG 2 guidelines is also minor. The results show that Nielsen heuristics and WCAG 2.0 guidelines contributed to identifying several usability problems, which might have missed out if either of them was used alone.