Should I Trust It When I Cannot See It? Credibility Assessment for Blind Web Users Ali Abdolrahmani and Ravi Kuber UMBC Baltimore, MD 21250 { aliab1, rkuber } @umbc.edu ABSTRACT As users become increasingly more reliant on online resources to satisfy their information needs, care is needed to ensure that these resources are credible in nature, especially if a decision is to be taken based upon the information accessed. The credibility of a web site is known to be heavily influenced by its visual appearance. However, for individuals who are blind, challenges are often faced accessing these visual cues when using assistive technologies. In this paper, we describe an observational study to examine the strategies and workarounds developed by individuals who are blind to perform credibility assessments. These are compared with those used by sighted users. Findings from the study have highlighted the relationship between accessibility and credibility. The features used to form assessments non-visually have also been identified. Insights from the study can be used to support the design of highly credible interfaces for blind screen reader users. CCS Concepts • Human Centered Computing➝Accessibility Keywords Accessibility; Blind; Visually-Impaired; Web Credibility 1. INTRODUCTION Recent advances in technology have revolutionized the ways in which information can be accessed and shared with others. As the volume of information available online increases, researchers suggest that the content available may not be subject to filtering through professional gatekeepers. This therefore raises issues surrounding the credibility or quality of content [15]. As users become increasingly more reliant on online resources to satisfy their information needs, the presence and prominence of incorrect and misleading content can have serious consequences for users [19], particularly for those who make decisions based upon the information accessed. The burden is placed on the user to assess levels of credibility [14]; however, difficulties are often faced by users during this process [15]. According to Fogg et al. [7], the two key components of credibility include trustworthiness and expertise. The trustworthiness dimension captures the perceived goodness or morality of the source, while the expertise dimension captures the perceived knowledge and skill of the source. When individuals explore online content, their assessment about the credibility of the information involves both objective judgments of information quality or accuracy, as well as subjective perceptions of the source’s trustworthiness, expertise, and attractiveness [9,15]. Additionally, the visual appearance of a web page plays a significant role in attracting information seekers, as well as impacting their perception of its credibility [8]. For individuals who are blind, obtaining these visual cues using screen readers can prove to be challenging. Assistive technologies, such as screen readers, are able to translate textual content from a web page into auditory or tactile format, enabling users to gain an overview of content. However, graphical information and structural layout can be difficult to perceive non- visually. As information is outputted in a linear and time- consuming fashion through a screen reader, it can be a frustrating process when attempting to traverse through content-heavy sites. Furthermore, features such as banners or menus may not vary from page-to-page, and may consequently be presented multiple times when exploring the contents of a site, thereby “overloading” the user [1]. Further details relating to the limitations associated with screen reading technologies can be found in [1,3,16]. In this paper, we describe an observational study examining the strategies and workarounds used by individuals who are blind to perform credibility assessments when using a screen reader. Findings have been compared with those of sighted users. The definition of credibility used for this study refers to the believability of some information and/or its source [11,15]. We are particularly interested in examining: (1) the non-visual cues and credibility criteria used to make judgments (termed: features); and (2) the relationship between accessibility and credibility when making assessments. 2. RELATED WORK 2.1 Credibility assessment The process of assessing credibility has been examined by a range of researchers. Hilligoss and Rieh [10] proposed a framework of credibility assessment in which credibility is characterized across a variety of media and resources with respect to diverse information seeking goals and tasks. The researchers conducted a diary study, where participants performed various information- seeking tasks. Through a grounded theory analysis, three distinct levels of credibility judgments emerged: construct (how a person constructs, conceptualizes, or defines credibility), heuristics (which involves general rules of thumb used to make judgments of credibility applicable to a variety of situations), and interaction Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org . ASSETS '16, October 23-26, 2016, Reno, NV, USA. © 2016 ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-4124-0/16/10…$15.00. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2982142.2982173 Available for education or research purposes only: Citation: Abdolrahmani, A. and Kuber, R., 2016: Should I Trust It When I Cannot See It? Credibility Perception and Assessment for Blind Web Users. In Proceedings of the 18th International ACM Conference on Computers and Accessibility – ASSETS’16, Reno, NV, 191-199.