Towards Designing and Sustaining an Online Community for Visually Impaired Users
Published in IEEE Workshop on Multimodal and Alternative Perception for Visually Impaired People (MAP4VIP), 2013
We have moved to Web 2.0 to meet our information needs, enjoying collective knowledge sharing and keeping up with the latest. Unfortunately, studies show a widening digital divide caused by accessibility issues associated with this platform, when being used by the visually impaired. Enabling sharing “blind-specific” information among the visually-impaired users and their peers can be very valuable in promoting an active and independent lifestyle. In this paper, we present GoingEasy®, a social networking site (SNS) developed for this special need. We present two key stages in designing and developing this SNS, discussing the problems faced over a period of one year and the proposed solutions to overcome them. The first stage deals with identifying the needs of the users in this community, packaging it in the SNS and the design factors that go into making the pages and the layout as accessible as possible. The second stage deals with improving the commitment and participation in the network, tailored around the fact that primary users access this site using a screen reader. We employ latent topic models to help build a recommender system that helps keep up the traffic in the network. Our experiments show that this is a promising direction in further developing this community.