Theses and Dissertations Collection

Screen readers, braille displays, and voice-activated personal assistants (VAPAs) are the most common accessibility technologies aiding blind users in computer navigation tasks. However, several usability and performance issues have been identified with each method. Screen readers are constrained by high cognitive workloads (Theofanos & Redish, 2003), a loss of graphical information (Harper et al., 2006; Leuthold et al., 2008), and overall inefficiency (Lazar et al., 2007). Braille displays are often costly, and braille literacy has dropped drastically since the 1950s (National Federation of the Blind, 2009). VAPAs cannot handle complex tasks (Abdolrahmani et al., 2018) and force the user to spend a significant amount of time correcting misunderstood text (Azenkot & Lee, 2013). In the context of menu navigation, the current project analyzed the potential of a novel 3D audio interface to be a viable alternative to a conventional screen reader. Participants were tasked with navigating menu structures of varying depth and breadth to select a target item with three different interface styles (3D audio, screen reader, and visual). Results indicated the 3D audio interface was significantly slower, more error prone, and subjectively less-usable than the screen reader. However, the 3D audio interface showed larger performance improvements over the course of the experiment than did either the screen reader or visual interfaces, potentially indicating that more practice with this interface could eventually yield performance advantages over a screen reader.