Evaluating Search Results Overviews and Previews with Visually Impaired Users

Going through search results can be a challenging process for visually impaired web surfers. Given the serial nature of the screen readers, this process can be lengthy and cumbersome. This paper introduces InteractSE, an interactive search engine that provides users with a high-level overview tree of the search results which represents the discovered concepts for clustered webpages. This overview also includes an automatically generated preview of each webpage. This preview discovers the related items on that webpage and generates a webpage preview. The user would have different options to expand and navigate between other discovered concepts (overviews) or drill down for the same concept-generated summary (preview). A user study was conducted with 35 visually impaired web surfers to examine the efficiency of this technique. That user study showed promising results when using the auto-generated clustered overview and preview summaries of the target web pages. The results also guided us in outlining future improvements that target the summary integration with other automated technologies such as conversation assistants and Chatbots.