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An exploratory study of web adaptation techniques for people with low vision

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Abstract

People with low vision may experience accessibility barriers when they interact with the web. The navigation strategies of low-vision users are explored in this article in order to select the appropriate accessibility techniques needed to design web interfaces for their benefit. First, a literature study and an observational study involving low-vision users were carried out. From these studies, a set of adaptation techniques were obtained, which were then evaluated by means of an exploratory study with the participation of twelve users with low vision. The results show that the advantages of some adaptation techniques varied depending on the type of assistive technology used by participants to access the web. Some of the applied adaptation techniques seem turned out to be helpful only for users who utilized screen magnifier software, but not for those using the browser zoom feature. New research hypotheses for a future experimental study have been obtained based on the results of the study presented in this article.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all study participants for their collaboration on the experiment. J. Eduardo Pérez held a Ph.D. scholarship from the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU (grant PIF13/284) when the study was conducted. Some of the authors are members of the EGOKITUZ/ADIAN research team, supported by the Basque Government, Department of Education, Universities and Research under grant (IT980-16). This work was partially funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government by the European Regional Development Fund – ERDF (eGovernAbility, grant TIN2014-52665-C2, MINECO/FEDER), PhysComp project (TIN2017-85409-P) and by the DeepEMR project (TIN2017-87548-C2-1-R).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Lourdes Moreno

  2. EGOKITUZ: Laboratory of HCI for Special Needs, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Informatika Fakultatea, Donostia, Spain

    Xabier Valencia, J. Eduardo Pérez & Myriam Arrue

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  1. Lourdes Moreno
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Correspondence to Lourdes Moreno.

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Moreno, L., Valencia, X., Pérez, J.E. et al. An exploratory study of web adaptation techniques for people with low vision. Univ Access Inf Soc 20, 223–237 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-020-00727-6

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