Design guidelines of a tool to help blind authors independently format their word documents

Abstract

Most work on document creators for blind people mainly concentrates on supporting document writing rather than document formatting, even though blind authors' documents are often treated dismissively when they do not match "expected" standards and many blind authors rely on sighted people to check their documents. Through understanding sighted readers' expectations and strategies and problems blind authors experience with current word processors, we compiled a set of guidelines for a formatting tool for blind authors. The guidelines include: the ability for users to control the level of corrections, the timeliness and intuitiveness of the information, and the compatibility with screen readers. We then developed a prototype with which we are conducting a case study evaluation, mainly, to come up with more guidelines. Emerging guidelines include: differentiating voices associated with content and formatting information, the ability to record user preference, and a preview of the surrounding context of the formatted items.