Accessibility in Reading for Blind and Low Vision Adults (old)

Introduction

I created this project to understand how blind and low vision (visually impaired or VI) readers access books for a variety of needs including school/professional enrichment and leisure reading. Accessing physical books can pose a challenge for blind and VI readers.

For the visually impaired, large print books have limited availability at local libraries and can be an expensive investment. Alternatively, regular print books require the use of visual aids like magnifiers which can make reading cumbersome. For the (more) totally blind, access to Braille is even more scarce: Braille books are massive in size and are even more expensive due to minimal transcribers available nationwide. In the age of technology, many have found digital solutions, including e-readers or tablets with adjustable font size, OCR scanning, digital Braille displays that refresh when connected to a device, audiobooks, or a combination of digital and analog tools like magnifiers. However, none of these solutions are as simple as opening and reading a physical book, and come with issues of their own.

Additionally, user research involving participants with disabilities are few and far between. I wanted to seize this opportunity by focusing my project on blind and low vision readers specifically.

Research Themes

1. How do blind and low vision readers find and access books they want to read?
2. What barriers do readers encounter when looking for books?
3. When and how do blind and low vision readers read?
4. What makes reading difficult?

Executive Summary

The Synthesis section of the final report goes into detail on each of the above research themes, but below are the most prominent discoveries.

1. Accessing Books: Well-maintained library services for the blind and visually impaired are important for all readers.
   7 of 9 participants regularly made use of library services for the blind and said they’ve improved over time by expanding their databases.
2. Barriers in Access: Readers often have to individually search platforms to find a book.
   Instead of searching once to learn where books are hosted, readers frequently perform redundant searches. See Persona Journey for an example.

3. How Readers Read: Customizability is key.
   All readers enjoyed the option of adjusting audio speeds, sleep timers, or changing font size and contrast.
4. Difficulties in Reading: Not all readings are suited for audio.
   Some genres, as well as proofreading, technical reading, and poor audio quality can make audio impractical.
5. Difficulties in Reading: PDFs are challenging to read.
   PDFs aren’t customizable by nature, and low vision readers must employ unique, but imperfect, problem-solving skills to read.
6. Physical books have important emotional significance.
   All readers mentioned missing the feel of turning pages and that the romanticism of reading is lost when reading via audio or digital.

Process

From my initial goal, I drafted the following themes.

Participant Recruitment & Interviews

Since this project would be generative and platform independent, I opted for participant interviews as this would allow me to ask broad questions.

I was told by my stakeholder (professor of my class) that I would need to recruit six initial participants from which to base my personas, followed by another three for follow-up conversations, making nine total. Having been in blind and low vision spaces before, I suspected blind and low vision readers’ needs would differ slightly, so I developed two target users (or in this case, readers).

I developed an interview guide from my research themes and began recruiting participants from connections I had made when attending blind and low vision nonprofit conferences, including the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation and the American Council of the Blind. I recruited participants not only on the limits of their vision, but also on their interest in reading: they had to enjoy it and read regularly, at least a few times a week.

After recruitment, I scheduled time with each participant for a 45-minute interview session. All interviews were conducted over Zoom and recorded with participant consent to be shared with project stakeholders. Each participant received an incentive for talking with me: a $5 gift card to Starbucks to enjoy coffee or tea with their next good read.

Interim Synthesis & Personas

After my first six participants, I synthesized the data by creating an affinity chart on Trello with each answer to a question on the interview guide and grouping them into similar themes.

I then developed two distinct personas to capture each type of reader.

Follow-up & Final Report

Using the personas as a guide, I sought after low vision readers that read for more than leisure alone, so I sought after students, continued learners, or on-the-job readers. I also noticed more diversity within low vision readers and wanted to learn more, so I ended up having more low vision than blind readers.

Finally, I compiled a final report with an executive summary, domain terms, participant overview, detailed synthesis, personas, persona journey, recommendations, and an appendix.

Recommendations

1. Leverage nonprofits to ensure all blind and low vision readers know about the services available to them.
   In casual conversation after interviews, the only two participants who didn’t use services specific to the blind like BARD were unaware of them or had learned about them years ago but never adopted. This gap in knowledge could have easily been prevented by nonprofits they were involved with promoting these services.

2. Allow readers to perform one search for a book by leveraging a service they already use.
   As mentioned in the journey map above, readers could use something like Google, Goodreads, or an accessible reading equivalent like the National Library Services for the Blind to know where books are available across platforms. More research would need to be done to determine where it would best benefit readers.

3. Ensure reading platforms have granular levels of customization.
   Many readers mentioned choosing one platform over another because they liked the customization options. Companies wishing to make their platforms competitive should allow deeper customization to attract more readers (e.g. RGB-level color tweaking as opposed to color presets, increasing speed by 0.1x rather than 0.25x).
4. Prioritize audio quality improvement on older recordings.
   While this won’t solve all audio limitations, it will benefit users who primarily rely on audio as a medium.
5. Work with a company like Adobe to allow access to open-source or free to print disabled PDF resources to improve accessibility.
   Ultimately, PDFs will always be imperfect, but they are here to stay. Putting accessibility behind a paywall is in itself inaccessible. Low vision and blind readers should have PDF customization options in addition to library services since nearly all readers interviewed dealt with them.

6. Offer more large print and Braille books in mainstream stores and libraries.
   It doesn’t have to be a large section, but carrying books in a format that blind and low vision readers can use sends a powerful message that they belong.

Final Report

The final report with detailed synthesis can be found below, in the link and the document viewer.