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