A Study on Web Experience among Visually Impaired Users in Malaysia Bavani Ramayah Faculty of Science, University of Nottingham (UNMC), Selangor, Malaysia. Bavani.ramayah@nottingham.edu.my 1 Azizah Jaafar, 2 Noor Faezah Mohd Yatim Faculty of Information Science and Technology, University Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Selangor, Malaysia. 1 aj@ftsm.ukm.my , 2 nfmy@ftsm.ukm.my Abstract — This study focused on the web experience and barriers among visually impaired (VIM) users in Malaysia when accessing web pageswith screen readers. In this study, eight visually impaired users were interviewed and reported major problems related to images, hyperlinks and page layout. Based on findings from qualitative survey, a comparative analysis was performed with (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) WCAG 2.0. Keywords-visually impaired user;WCAG 2.0;web accessibility; I. VISUALLY IMPAIRED WEBUSERS The web has become the most valuable tool for blind users to interact with people from all over the world. Today, they able to find information from the web since there are many assistive technologies available in the market. For example, visually impaired web users can use screen reader software with speech output, Braille output or both, to access web contents. Screen reader software such as JAWS [9] and NVDA [9] reads the content of web pages, and produces two types of output: synthesized speech via audio and Braille via a Braille display. Based on the HTML tags contained in a web document, headings, link titles, and menu items are read out or displayed in Braille format. However, assistive technologies such as screen readers are not able to read successfully with the web pages containing frames, non-descriptive graphics, video and audio content without captioning, and overly complex screen layout. II. WEBACCESSIBILITY INMALAYSIA The statistics for the year 2007 showed that the total number of disabilities in Malaysia is 220,250 however 20,039 of them are the visually impaired people [10]. Despite this, the Malaysian Association for the Blind (MAB) has reported that three-quarters of Malaysian websites are not completely accessible to visuallyimpaired users[15], and 70% of Malaysian websites, numbering 100,000 do not conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)[2]. III. RELATED WORK They have been many researches done on web site i faced by VIM users. Huang (2003) for example, evaluated accessibility of e-government web sites in Taiwanusing WCAG. The research found that there are twenty-five homepages from thirty-five agencies that have access problems, such as incomplete tags for tables, page incompatibility with the latesttechnology, and the most serious problem identified is failing to provide alternate ( tag in non-text web site elements. Similar problems found in Asakawa(2005), where there were cases of inappropriate ALT texts and broken skip-navigation links. Jeffrey (2007 ) found that most of blind users avoid pa containing severe accessibility problems, such as those re to dynamic contents. He also found that some designers o pay attentions to the guidelines and regulations, without understanding the real importance of objectivity. E.M (2007) identified problematic file types and web features graphics and images that cause problems to VIM use comparative analysis with W3C 1.0 have been done in ord address the issues. The accessibility and usability pro leads to frustration among users with visual impairement study done by J.Lazar (2003) found that thirty three to fif percent of the time spent in front of the computer i due to frustrating experiences which is caused by web navigations. Frustration could also cause mood deteri to VIM users. [6] The discussion above presented various aspects of experiences and related issues faced by VIM users. This s extends previous studies by identifying issuesfaced by visually impaired users in Malaysia. IV. METHODOLOGY A semi-structured interview was conducted to exp issues related to usability and accessibility problems experienced when using screen reader software to access sites. The participants were interviewed using either these methods: face-to-face or phone-in. 11 2010 International Conference on User Science Engineering (i-USEr) 978-1-4244-9049-3/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE