Hi, I'm Anastasia Schaadhardt from the University of Washington,
presenting work on understanding blind screen reader users experiences of digital
artboards conducted by myself, Alexis Hiniker and Jacob Wobbrock
an artboard is a two dimensional digital canvas that is object-based
like Adobe Illustrator as opposed to pixel-based like Microsoft Paint.
Creative and professional software
applications involving artboards are prevalent in schools and offices around
the world, familiarity with such applications is an expectation of many employers.
Blind software users, however, are often confronted with significant
accessibility barriers when interacting with such applications.
Although screen readers can announce some visual data for blind users,
the information offered is often either incomplete or difficult to interpret.
To illustrate this,
the following is a screen reader describing objects on an artboard
in Microsoft PowerPoint, the artboard has a green circle next
to a red rectangle with the words "hello, world" on it and to the right of them
on the bottom edge of the artboard is a black arrow pointing up. "Text
frame hello, world.
Right arrow.
Rectangle obscured.
Oval. One hundred and sixty four points from top slide edge.
Two ninety seven points from bottom slide edge." In order to understand
the needs of and the issues faced by blind users of artboard programs,
we conducted a mixed-methods study in two phases with 15 total participants.
In the first phase,
we conducted contextual interviews and observations with 12 participants.
In the interviews, we asked participants about their experiences with artboard
programs and then observed them, creating a digital presentation about
their favorite book or animal using their preferred program.
They were asked to think aloud as they made the presentation.
The second phase was a task-based
usability study of 12 participants, nine of whom participated in the interviews.
During the study, participants performed two sets of tasks.
The first set dealt with content
interpretation, and the participants had to answer
questions about the artboard from the beginning of this video.
The second set with content generation.
And for these tasks, participants were asked to place
and manipulate objects on artboard. Participants were timed while performing
the tasks and were asked to stop after five minutes.
We found that blind users experience significant educational and professional
barriers due to the inaccessibility of artboards.
These included feelings of exclusion or
isolation from sighted peers or colleagues,
a lack of accessibility knowledge among sighted artboard authors,
and experiences of barriers to participants' own authorship.
Participants also reported high cognitive
loads from a lack of feedback about artboard contents and object state.
The participants struggled with remembering all of the information
they were receiving, sorting out which information was actually
needed, and then performing calculations in their heads to complete a given task.
One participant commented that it was too much information and not enough
at the same time.
Participants consistently encountered
challenges related to understanding relative positions of objects
on the artboard and the relationships among objects. In the usability study,
for example, only four participants were able to at least partially determine
the relationship between the rectangle and the oval.
Based on participant interviews and observations.
We identified three goals for design
interventions to improve artboard accessibility.
First,
using Bennett et al.'s interdependence framework,
the accessibility of artboard can be understood as a relation between a blind
person and the artboard program, other assistive technology, and the other
people who interact with the blind person and the artboard project.
So what kinds of accessibility features could
assist a sighted artboard author? For example, one participant expressed the
desire for presentation programs to alert an author when their presentation is
inaccessible so they would have to knowingly exclude people.
Secondly, we propose that artboards have glanceability. Several participants
expressed that the cognitive load required to understand a slide's spatial layout or
to accomplish other tasks related to that was not worth the results they achieved.
However, participants indicate that this information would be useful to have if it
did not require as much effort and expertise to obtain it.
One participant said that just as sighted users
receive a print preview of a document,
we need something as blind people to have
a print preview, but be just describing where elements are in relation to one another
on the page. Another participant proposed tactile
feedback as an option for improving glanceability.
I want to visualize the triangle as I'm like feeling with my fingers, they said.
Lastly, several participants perceived
the artboards as fragile, something that they could easily mess up
unknowingly, which caused participants to be afraid to interact with projects.
Instead we propose that an artboard should be robust in order for users to perceive
it as something they can manipulate without worrying that they will break it.
A robust artboard would, for example, clearly indicate to a user that an object
manipulation has occurred and describe what that manipulation was.
Thank you for your time.