Jun 8, 2011
Tabbed Browsing and Persons with Visual Impairments
I’ve recently started looking into tabbed browsing, and found a study done by Patrick Dubroy and Ravin Balakrishnan [1]. This study was conducted to examine the usage of tabs amongst Mozilla Firefox users. It provided some really good insight on why and how users currently utilize tabbed browsing — something that has become an essential part of many people’s web browsing experience (mine, anyway). Here are a few points that I personally found very interesting:
- Tabs offer users another mechanism for managing the sites that they browse — it allows for “higher-level task grouping”.
- Users like to use tabs as reminders for tasks that they’ve yet to complete, and bookmarks for websites that they often have to visit.
- Many people pointed out that they really like how new tabs are spawned in the background, as opposed to how new windows are launched in the foreground. This gives them control over when they would like to visit that page (new tab). Whereas in the case of a new window, their attention would be immediately drawn to the new window in the foreground.
- Users often choose to use tabs over “traditional revisitation mechanisms” (consisting of the back button, browser history, and bookmarks) because switching between tabs does not require reloading a page — it allows them to preserve the state of the website they are viewing.
Although this paper helped me understand how people currently use tabs, all the participants in this study were sighted users. I’m interested in knowing how the visually impaired users interact with tabs (if they do so at all). Are tabs something that they currently find useful? Does it help or hinder the aural web browsing experience? Some of my questions remain unanswered:
- Do visually impaired users use tabs? How are tabs envisioned in their mind?
- How does the use of tabs differ from the use of multiple browser windows for visually impaired individuals? Which one is preferred?
- What type of challenges and opportunities are experienced when using tabs?
- What type of challenges and opportunities are experienced when multiple web browser windows opened?
It’ll be great if I could get some feedback from the community! It’ll be helpful to understand how visually impaired users currently use web browsers, and any personal experiences that they may want to share.
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[1] Patrick Dubroy, Ravin Balakrishnan: A study of tabbed browsing among mozilla firefox users. CHI 2010: 673-682
I’m a totally blind self-proclaimed power user. :) Answers to your questions below:
Q: Do visually impaired users use tabs? How are tabs envisioned in their mind?
A: Almost always. It’s extremely rare that I have only one tab open. I frequently have more than 5 tabs open and sometimes 10, though I rarely go too far beyond that. I use tabs in exactly the same ways and for the same reasons as discussed for sighted users. I just see them as different documents in the same browser between which I can rapidly switch on demand.
Q: How does the use of tabs differ from the use of multiple browser windows for visually impaired individuals? Which one is preferred?
A: I generally avoid (and rarely use) multiple browser windows. The only exception to this is when I am, for example, giving a presentation and don’t want the tabs I left open in my main browser window to appear in the presentation (accidentally switching to the wrong tab, etc.).
Q: What type of challenges and opportunities are experience when using tabs?
A: Switching between tabs is incredibly fast for me with the use of shortcut keys; i.e. control+1-9 to switch to tabs 1-9, respectively. This does require me to get a feel for the order of my tabs, but once I get used to this in a given situation, switching becomes a breeze. I’m not sure if there are shortcuts for tabs beyond the 10th, but I rarely do this anyway. That said, I might use even more tabs if I had some way of grouping and ordering them such as Firefox’s Panorama interface. Unfortunately, Firefox Panorama is still inaccessible.
Q: What type of challenges and opportunities are experience when multiple web browser windows opened?
A: One of the main reasons i use tabs instead of browser windows is that it keeps my task list clean. Alt+tabbing between 10 browser windows or trying to find one in the running applications bar would be hideous. That said, see my comment above regarding presentations.
Like Jamie above, I am blind and use tabs extensively. Here are my answers to your questions:
Q: Do visually impaired users use tabs? How are tabs envisioned in their mind?
Tabs are the greatest invention in the way how to open new web pages, IMO! I find it very clean to have them all within one application and not have to worry about cluttering up my task bar. Tabs are my cueues to come back to stuff I want to work on, read or the like. Yes I know there’s InstaPaper, and I use that on my mobile devices, but on the desktop, tabs are THE means for me to keep track of. I also use app tabs to keep stuff I want to have open constantly grouped together.
Q: How does the use of tabs differ from the use of multiple browser windows for visually impaired individuals? Which one is preferred?
Coming from the Windows world, multiple browser windows were always cluttering up the task bar for me, so I have not used multiple browser windows at all except for, as Jamie also mentioned, when I wanted to present something to an audience. Ever since accessible browsers came about that had tabbed browsing, I’ve never opened a page in a new window again on Windows.
Having said that, however, I’m finding that I use different browser windows on the Mac a lot. The reason is the VoiceOver feature that allows to quickly navigate all open document windows within an application. Also because in Mac OS, multiple client windows of an application do not clutter up the dock or cmd+tab order, I have no trouble using windows there.
Q: What type of challenges and opportunities are experience when using tabs?
Being able to switch rapidly between tabs is definitely a big big plus. Also being able to search your tabs from the awesome bar in Firefox is just so convenient! It’s just that sometimes, when there are a lot of tabs, I wish there was a way to group them by topic (like bugs, newspaper articles and such).
Q: What type of challenges and opportunities are experience when multiple web browser windows opened?
As I said above, and Jamie also pointed out, except for when I only want to present a controlled environment to an audience, I’ve never used multiple windows on Windows again. It’s just not all in one place like with tabs!
My visual impairment is Ocular Albinism with (horizontal) Nystagmus. While my visually acuity itself is poor, it’s the Nystagmus that is the biggest issue. I can only stay visually focused on objects for a few seconds before they begin to move (and become unrecognizable) so the quicker that I can locate an object that I’m scanning for and process it, the better off I am.
Multiple windows do not work for me because it means scanning the taskbar, locking on a title, processing it, and then moving on until I find the one that I want. Plus I have to filter out the non-browser related titles in the taskbar.
Tabbed browsing works for me for many reasons but in particular in XUL based applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, and even third party ones because I can fully customize the appearance of tabs (as well as nearly everything else) through add-ons and more so with CSS.
For example, my tab text size is 21px with a dark background, blue-ish green text, and no borders.
The active tab has a yellow border with yellow text, and the hover text is bold with white used for the text and border.
I usually use Trebuchet MS for Firefox’s UI when running Windows.
I used to use a larger text size, but my bookmarks toolbar is customized as well and used a large font size and so I needed to make some room.
Making things more obvious and that stands out from other objects helps tremendously to quickly find what I’m looking for.
Firefox tabs in their default state/style are difficult for me to distinguish from one another, like multiple titles in the taskbar.
Again, the quicker something cam be located and recognized, the less time spent on trying to focus on and process it.
I came here after seeing a Tweet from Marco and I’m leaving realizing that I should be sharing how I customize Firefox for my own needs on Access Firefox.
That was the initial purpose/mission of the project, so thanks.
:)
Tabbed browsing is a huge boon to me; two of my tabs in FF that are always open or close at hand in a tab group are the About:Config and Manage AddOns.
I’m also like sighted people in that tabs let me organize what i’m doing;
I’d love an AddOn that’ll let me re-sort the tabs in any order i want.
I use FireFox 4 with Jaws or NVDA;
also have FireFox 3.7 as a fallback;
BTW, totally loving both releases…
they are designed to be fully portable so they go where i go.
As a side note, one of my fave AddOns is Noise, which is a FireFox-specific AddOn that plays sounds triggered by FireFox events.
Having different sounds play for an alert bubble, new tab opened, new window opened, and various form sounds like checkbox and radio states changing, submit, and reset all go a very long way to making a Mozilla experience all the more enjoyable.
[...] then you'd need to copy their doctype since obviously you can't change theirs. This is an interesting post and the comments by readers about how they use tabs (as opposed to new w…. I think I'm going to post that over in Accessibility. __________________ I'm no expert but I [...]