Enhancing Non-Visual Interaction with Online User-Generated Content

The Web has become the dominant medium for our everyday activities, including communication, business, e-commerce, news, and entertainment. Consequently, the online world is experiencing an explosion of User-Generated Content (UGC), particularly on social media platforms and online review systems. To facilitate convenient interaction with UGC, web platforms have adopted various presentation strategies that enable users to efficiently browse and contribute to the UGC. However, these user interfaces are primarily designed for sighted individuals, so they do little to assist blind users who rely predominantly on audio-based screen reader assistive technology. The extant efforts to improve web interaction for blind users have mostly focused on improving either the accessibility of visual content, such as images and videos, or the usability of overall webpage navigation. While these general-purpose solutions certainly improve the usability of UGC for blind users to a certain extent, they presently lack the ability to address the blind users’ unique usability needs associated with different kinds of UGC. I address this gap in this thesis by examining and enhancing the non-visual usability of two popular kinds of online UGC, namely discussion forums and review systems. For discussion forums, I built PView, a browser extension that enables blind users to conveniently customize discussion threads, allowing them to efficiently and selectively navigate posts based on their interests and preferences. Likewise, for online review systems, I built QuickCue, a browser extension that helps blind users efficiently explore the information in online customer reviews, through a set of thematically-focused and sentiment-aware summaries autogenerated from the raw reviews. By extracting and presenting key information upfront, QuickCue reduces the need to sift through long, unstructured texts, thereby minimizing listening fatigue and supporting more informed decision-making. To further improve user experience in online review systems, I also devised a non-visual ‘speed-listening’ technique, namely ReviewSkim, to augment both PView and QuickCue, enabling blind users to quickly skim through UGC, akin to how sighted users can quickly grasp the essence of content through visual speed-reading. In sum, this thesis lays the groundwork for designing novel assistive technologies for enabling blind users to usably interact with online UGC.