Characterizing Language Use in Online Accessibility Discussion Forums

Discussion forums are one of the favored platforms for knowledge sharing. Given their popularity, copious research exists on understanding the linguistic and behavioral characteristics of forum conversations, so as to inform the design of many downstream applications including discourse visualization, sentiment analysis, and question answering. However, prior investigations have mainly focused on general forums designed primarily for sighted users, and as such the applicability of their findings to dedicated accessibility discussion forums frequented by blind screen reader users remains unanswered. To bridge this knowledge gap and facilitate the development of better-informed assistive technologies for blind people, we investigated language use in accessibility forums and identified unique linguistic and cognitive characteristics of discussions in these forums. To aid our investigation, we collected a dataset of 1000 accessibility forum threads and a baseline of 1000 general forum threads, while ensuring that the threads in both groups discussed similar topics. In our analyses, we found the language in accessibility forum conversations to be more task-oriented and less abstract, with significantly higher number of descriptive action verbs than in general forum conversations. Moreover, the accessibility threads had significantly higher authenticity scores than general threads, which indicates that blind users are less reserved in online discussions, and are instead more spontaneous and expressive in their writing. We lastly discuss the implications of our findings, including how assistive technologies can be enhanced to improve blind users’ experience in online discussion forums.