Finding the Signal in the Noise: An Exploratory Study on Assessing the Effectiveness of AI and Accessibility Forums for Blind Users' Support Needs

TL;DR

This study explores how blind users experience AI and accessibility forums, revealing challenges like information overload and unreliable AI responses, and suggests design improvements for better support tools.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into blind users' interactions with forums and generative AI, highlighting support gaps and proposing design opportunities for more reliable assistive resources.

Findings

Forums cause cognitive overload due to overlapping and irrelevant content.

GenAI tools produce unreliable and contradictory answers, increasing verification effort.

Users face barriers with AI-generated information, impacting trust and usability.

Abstract

Accessibility forums and, more recently, generative AI tools have become vital resources for blind users seeking solutions to computer-interaction issues and learning about new assistive technologies, screen reader features, tutorials, and software updates. Understanding user experiences with these resources is essential for identifying and addressing persistent support gaps. Towards this, we interviewed 14 blind users who regularly engage with forums and GenAI tools. Findings revealed that forums often overwhelm users with multiple overlapping topics, redundant or irrelevant content, and fragmented responses that must be mentally pieced together, increasing cognitive load. GenAI tools, while offering more direct assistance, introduce new barriers by producing unreliable answers, including overly verbose or fragmented guidance, fabricated information, and contradictory suggestions that fail to follow prompts, thereby heightening verification demands. Based on these insights, we outlined design opportunities to improve the reliability of assistive resources, aiming to provide blind users with more trustworthy and cognitively-manageable support.