Web Mobility Guidelines for Visually Impaired Surfers

The ‘Towel’ project seeks to find solutions to problems encountered by visually impaired users when travelling in the World-Wide-Web (Web) by leveraging solutions found in real-world mobility. Visually impaired users find mobility on the Web particularly difficult because of the reliance of hypermedia on visual layout. Hypertext design and usability guidelines have traditionally concentrated upon navigation to facilitate this mobility; consequently other aspects of travel are neglected. This paper seeks to address these issues by extending current guidelines and design methods to include the real-world mobility concepts of orientation, memory, environment, preview and the purpose of the task at hand.