Taming Entangled Accessibility Forum Threads for Efficient Screen Reading

Accessibility forums enable individuals with visual impairments to connect and collaboratively seek solutions to technical issues, as well as share reviews, best practices, and latest news. However, these forums are presently built on legacy systems that were primarily designed for sighted users, and are difficult to navigate with non-visual assistive technologies like screen-readers. Accessibility forum threads are “entangled”, with multiple sub-conversations interleaved with each other. This does not gel with the predominantly linear navigation of screen-readers. Screen-reader users often listen to reams of irrelevant posts while foraging for nuggets of interest. To address this and improve non-visual interaction efficiency, we present TASER, a browser extension that leverages a state-of-the-art conversation disentanglement algorithm to automatically identify and separate sub-conversations in a forum thread, and then presents these sub-conversations to the user via a custom interface specifically tailored for efficient and usable screen-reader interaction. In a user study with 11 screen-reader users, we observed that TASER significantly reduced the average user input actions and interaction times by and respectively along with a significant drop in cognitive load ( lower NASA-TLX score) compared to the status quo while performing representative information foraging tasks on accessibility forums.