Importance of Digital Library Design Guidelines to Support Blind and Visually Impaired Users: Perceptions of Key Stakeholders

Abstract

AbstractThis study was conducted to understand how key stakeholders perceive the importance of design guidelines that specifically target the needs of blind and visually impaired (BVI) digital library (DL) users. An in-depth survey questionnaire was distributed among 150 participants representing three stakeholder groups: BVI users, DL developers, and scholars/experts. Participants were informed about different help-seeking situations that BVI users encountered when interacting with a DL non-visually using screen readers. They were then presented with a set of design guidelines to address each situation. Finally, they were asked to rate the importance of each set of guidelines in remediating each corresponding situation. Both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis were applied to analyze the data. The results show that all key stakeholders agree it is critical to develop DL design guidelines to support BVI users. On the one hand, the three groups share some similarities in rating the importance of guidelines for these help-seeking situations; on the other hand, the disparities mainly lie in the fact that DL developers and the scholars/experts focused more on the guidelines addressing the accessibility-related situations, while BVI users emphasized that DL design guidelines need to take into consideration both accessibility and usability-related situations.KeywordsDigital library design guidelinesAssessmentBlind and visually impaired users