From screen reading to aural glancing

Abstract

Whereas glancing at a web page is crucial for navigation, screen readers force users to listen to content serially. This hampers efficient browsing of complex pages and maintains an accessibility divide between sighted and screen-reader users. To address this problem, we adopt a three-pronged strategy: (1) in a user study, we identified key page-level navigation problems that screen-reader users face while browsing a complex site; (2) through a crowd-sourcing system, we prioritized the most relevant sections of different page types necessary to support basic tasks; (3) we introduced DASX, a navigation approach that augments the ability of screen-reader users to "aurally glance" at a complex page by accessing at any time the most relevant page sections. In a preliminary evaluation, DASX markedly reduced the gap in page navigation efficiency between screen-reader and sighted users. Our contribution provides the groundwork for rethinking access strategies that strongly tie aural navigation to user's tasks.