Development of a Search Engine Tool for Visually Impaired Web Users

Abstract

The internet has become useful in just about anything we do. Unfortunately, as vision degrades so does our ability to perceive the web. The design of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) has become overwhelmingly common and is meant to be coupled with a screen and mouse. The interface introduced in this thesis was developed to avoid graphically driven design and create a novel Search Engine interface intended for blind and low vision users. This is achieved by minimizing the total concern of the user (the userspace) to a handful of options and a predetermined structure to the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This thesis describes the entire development process starting from the literature review and including implementation, evaluation, and future work.