Website Usability Visually Impaired Goms-Tonn-Eichstadt

This note last modified February 23, 2021

#notesFromPaper Year : Tags : GOMS accessibility Authors: Tonn-Eichstadt

Websites that interact with blind users face particular challenges.

There are a variety of standards describing web accessibility, including those created by the Web Accessibility Initiative and ISO Standards. The established Web Content Accessibility Guidelines have proved to be incomplete and incomprehensible for practical work.

Automated tools are similarly helpful, but incomplete. These tools look at guidelines for use, but fail to discuss actual usability for impaired users.

Research on the user profiles of how impaired users interact with the internet is limited, lacking nuance, and limited to the United States and great Britain.

  • assistive technologies have a variety of functions that need to be taken into account
  • Users know few features, but use those features well
  • Experts have a cascading set of features they use. If one fails, they use the other
  • Well made sites are quickly learnable. Users are not experts of new sites
  • Due to different configurations of readers, timing is difficult to determine

GOMS is for experts

Screen readers transform interfaces into linear output, which is good

Paper authors were unable to find operator times

now it talks about a variety of potential goals

content acquisition time has to be taken into account

Getting operator times is a problem. Different speech rates and braille reading times.

Failures of GOMS:

  • Different operators used based on specifics of site means GOMS may not work. Error free workflow?
  • Difficulty of determining timing due to different workflows, different configurations, and lack of data
    • GOMS needs to be modified to discuss content acquisition as well
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