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Re: Research into linear access

for

From: Chris Lewis
Date: Dec 3, 2003 7:23AM

Mark

This may not be quite what you're looking for, but TechDis published this study
of blind and visually impaired students use of VLEs which covers some of the
same issues:

http://www.techdis.ac.uk/resources/VLE002.html

Chris

Chris Lewis
Web Accessibility Officer
Cardiff University

>>> "Mark Magennis" < <EMAIL REMOVED> > 03/12/2003 14:00:21 >>>
Is anyone aware of any research that has been done on linear access to
Internet resources? I'm interested in this because difficulties with linear
access is one of the things which makes many web pages unusable by a person
with a screen reader, even if those pages are 'technical accessible' by
having compliant code, correct alt text, etc. Screen readers, being linear
access devices, have to start at the beginning and go through everything to
get to the end. This makes it difficult to do some things that sighted
people take for granted: get a quick overview of a web page, perceive the
way information is chunked or skip quickly between different chunks. These
are all things that are relatively easy if you are using a visual browser
and accessing it by sight. But if you can't do this then the design of some
pages makes it extremely difficult or frustrating to try and make sense of
what is there and find information or functionality.



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