BSpeak is an accessible crowdsourcing marketplace that enables blind people in developing regions to earn money by transcribing audio files through speech. We examine accessibility and usability barriers that 15 first-time users, who are low-income and blind, experienced while completing transcription tasks on BSpeak and Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Our mixed-methods analysis revealed severe access...

About 300 million people with vision impairments face significant access and usability barriers in interacting with social networking sites (SNS) to communicate, collaborate and enhance professional relationships. These barriers primarily result from the visuo-centric design of Web 2.0 technologies. Literature recognizes that SNS interaction with assistive technologies is problematic, but does ...

Accessibility to adequate health services is a basic human right. Israeli road blocks and checkpoints inhibit access to health care for the Palestinian population. While other studies have dealt with the impact of the barriers, few are based on actual measurements of transport times between locations. Geographical information systems (GIS) and network analysis were used to generate different es...

Two versions of a website, a non-accessible site (NA-website) and an accessible site (A-website), were tested by 13 participants who were: a) blind users, b) low-vision users and c) users without identified disabilities. The mood of the users and their interaction efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction were recorded as they encountered several web content accessibility barriers. Results sho...

This dissertation consists of five papers and an introduction. In Barriers in travel models, the focus is on modelling mobility in border regions, both borders within nations and between nations. We use travel surveys and networks from Sweden and Norway to model the barrier effect caused by the borders in the region between two counties on each side of the national border. In Identifying local ...

Disabled people encounter many barriers while attempting to access the services on the web. Nevertheless, many tools, which could help them to access the web, are available. E-commerce websites have been also intensively and widely used. The e-commerce market in Saudi Arabia will hit $13.3 billion by 2015. This huge investment requires e-commerce websites to be accessible by different types of ...

In this article, we present the results of a series of focus groups with people with disabilities, in which we took a cross-disability, lifespan perspective of disability. Consumers were asked about a broad set of barriers, such as problems with communication, transportation, and insurance, as well as about barriers related to physical accessibility. We used the Institute of Medicine’s framewor...

There are significant barriers preventing many users, often disadvantaged citizens such as people with disabilities and elderly people, from accessing many services and information provided by e-solutions, especially governmental and commercial web sites and public access systems. Tenuta is a project funded by the European Union (EU) that is helping improve the usability and accessibility of es...