Study plan
NavAccess Case Study Study Outline
Learn the key ideas, design rationale, prototype features, evaluation findings, and design implications of the NavAccess case study on website navigation for blind users.
Lessons in this plan
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1
Blind Users’ Website Navigation Problems and the NavAccess Research Goal
Explain the main navigation problems blind users face on websites, define the three focus challenges addressed by NavAccess, and state the project’s goal of making website navigation more effective, efficient, and pleasant.
- 2 Design Rationale Behind the First NavAccess Prototype Describe why the researchers shifted from page-level solutions to website-level support and how the first prototype exposed a site’s infrastructure through an interface communicated via XML.
- 3 First Prototype Features and Two Navigation Styles Identify the first prototype’s key interaction features, including one-handed numeric keypad control, moving through link structure, probing link targets, and the distinction between structure-level navigation and detailed page-level exploration.
- 4 How the Prototype Was Evaluated with Blind Participants Summarize the user study setup with ten blind participants, including interviews, observation of normal website use, free exploration of the Dan Brown website with NavAccess, familiar-task testing, and think-aloud data collection.
- 5 Observed Navigation Strategies Without NavAccess Analyze how participants handled inaccessible sites using detours, memorized routes, row and column counting, headings, in-page search, and remembered landmarks to filter irrelevant content and reach task-relevant areas.
- 6 Evaluation Findings: What Worked and What Did Not Assess the main results of the prototype evaluation, including why the second interface was confusing, why users were not interested in building a mental model of whole-site structure, and which functions showed value, such as link target previews.
- 7 Design Implications from the Focus Areas State the design recommendations derived from the study: provide summary information about the current website and page, describe available actions and steps, offer optional preview information about link targets, and support user-driven landmark-based navigation.
- 8 The Second NavAccess Prototype as a Firefox Extension Describe the later Firefox-extension version of NavAccess and its enhanced link-list features, including filtering, sorting, moving to links or following them, incremental search, case sensitivity, target-address search, context retrieval, and duplicate removal.