Non-Visual Access to the Digital Library: the use of digital library interfaces by blind and visually impaired people

摘要

The rapid development of networked information and communications technologies provides opportunities for radical changes in the services which can be delivered to all information users, including those who need to use 'accessible' formats and systems in order to overcome visual or other disability. Bearing this in mind, the Non-Visual Access to the Digital Library (NoVA) project was concerned with countering the exclusion from access to information, which can all too easily occur when individuals do not have so-called 'normal' vision. During experiments carried out as part of the Resources for Visually Impaired users of the Electronic Library project (Brophy and Craven, 1999) undertaken by CERLIM, in which blind people accessed a variety of online resources, it became apparent that navigation is a major problem within digital library resources. Although there is evidence of much good work to make interfaces accessible there is less work published on the information seeking behaviour of blind and visually impaired people, and in particular on how the serial paradigm of a blind person's search maps onto the parallelism displayed by most interfaces. Work on accessibility concentrates on transcribing text (or replacing images etc. with text) when the problem may in fact be much deeper. Work on information seeking behaviour and the use of interfaces assumes visual capabilities, which blind and visually impaired people may not possess.