Tests with blind programmers using AWMo: an accessible web modeling tool

Abstract

With the increase of public utility services being offered by many organizations, such as companies and government institutions, over the Internet and on other electronic medium, the concern related to the access blind and visually impaired citizens is raised. But still, some types of data remain intrinsically unaccessible such as software models, that are generally represented by visually rich diagrams which are inaccessible to screen readers. The goal of this paper is to categorize and evaluate the navigation strategies of blind users using a web application that allows access to UML class diagrams by using a specialized textual language. The investigation was done by analyzing videos with screen capture that were collected as part of a case study conducted with two blind programmers to evaluate the AWMo efficacy in enabling access to visual diagrams for blind and visually impaired software developers. We identified three navigation strategies adopted by the users during the study and the results of the analysis suggest that the navigation in long texts may become a burden on users memories, despite their strategies to improve their speed, non sequential text navigation methods must be further investigated.