How visually impaired people navigate the web
what people that work with digital products need to know.
When I wrote my first article about how accessibility is a must in the design of products and is in fact a moral/ethical consideration, a reader — Hamza, gave a feedback on how empathising with visually impaired folks might be hard. How do you go about designing or developing for these people when you don’t even know how they navigate the web, he asked.
I found this reasoning enlightening. I had taken the knowledge of how blind users navigate the web for granted assumed it was mainstream. But the truth is, it isn’t, not for sighted people — a demographic that is heavily involved in product design and development. And this gap is rarely breached during user research. We tend to skip the visually impaired demographic during research except when the product is explicitly made for them.
Of course it would be a no-brainer to advocate that user researches should be more inclusive, but to also grow empathy among product teams where accessibility is concerned, I think, like Hamza suggested, that things such as how visually impaired people use the web should be mainstream knowledge, especially for product teams.
In my search to provide a well rounded answer to the question, I watched lots of videos of blind people using navigating the web — here are some common insights I obtained from these experiences:
They use screen-readers
Screen readers are text to speech softwares in computers that read out the content of web pages to visually impaired users. As you can imagine, blind users do not see the contents of a webpage like sighted users do. Instead they rely on screen readers to read out the content and generally rely on them to navigate the web.
Navigation is done using the keyboard
Unlike sighted people who mainly navigate the contents of a website with mouses and trackpads, visually impaired people rely on keyboards to navigate contents of a web page. How easy the navigation of a site is depends on how well structured the content is.
They ‘Scan’ Web Contents
Just like sighted users who don’t read every content of their webpage, but rather scan till they find something they are looking for, visually impaired users follow this pattern of web behaviour. The only difference being that, they do it with screen readers. They tell the screen readers to read out the major components of the page for them. The success of the ‘scanning’ endeavour of course depends on how accessible the page is. Otherwise they’d be stuck with reading every content of the page — an act that can prove dreary.
They can read super fast!
A screen reader can read out the content of a webpage at a speed that’s impossible for sighted people to follow. This seems to be the default mode most visually impaired users use for easy/light reading. For complex subjects that require deep thoughts however, they may lower the speed of the screen reader. The ability to listen to stuff at a very fast speed is an art users of screen readers have mastered.
They memorise sites they visit often
Just like how sighted users know their way around websites they visit often, same applies to blind users. The only difference being they memorise how the content is organised. So imagine if an update that dramatically changes the structure of a site occurs, this could cause confusion to a visually impaired user.
They can reorder links alphabetically
There are websites that have loads of links. An e-commerce site for example. How does a blind user navigate these links to pick the very one they are interested in? They use their keyboard. There’s a key designed to help them reorder links alphabetically. Say they want a link that starts with A, that can type in the letter A after reordering — an action that opens the link right away.
Image description can be a pain
Screen readers can’t describe an image — at least not yet. What they do is read out the content of the alt tag. So how well a blind user understands an image depends on how well a developer or uploader of the images describe it or if they even describe it. And since a lot of website experiences today are accompanied with the use of photos, you can imagine how painful it is when the alt tag/feature isn’t used or photo properly described.
Too many Ads can ruin the experience
Ads can be a pain for anyone. But sighted users have the advantage of ignoring ads once they recognise them. Screen readers can’t make this distinction. Instead it treats every content of a webpage as vital which visually impaired users have to acknowledge.
Conclusion
This is not an exhaustive list of how visually impaired people use the web. But by understanding these behaviours, we can design and develop better accessible products. Here are links to other resources that can be helpful and give better knowledge of how visually impaired people use the web:
