Traversing the Web: Mobility Heuristics for Visually Impaired Surfers

Movement, or mobility, is key to the accessibility, design, and usability of many websites. While some peripheral mobility issues have been addressed few have centered on the mobility problems of visually impaired users. We use our past work to address these issues and derive mobility heuristics from mobility models, use these heuristics to place mobility objects within a web page, and describe the construction of a prototype mobility instrument, in the form of a Netscape plug-in, to process these objects. Our past work extends the notion of movement to include environment, feedback and the purpose of the current travel task. Specifically, we likened web use to travelling in a virtual space, compared it to travelling in a physical space, and introduced the idea of mobility the ease of travel as opposed to travel opportunity.