Usability of Partially Localised Websites in Switzerland: A Study with Screen Reader Users

A usability study involving ten multilingual visually impaired users was conducted on two university websites in German. Both websites were partially localised into French, English and, one of them, into Italian, but to different degrees: the first one had been reorganised, while the second one offered a mirror structure. The main goals were to observe the interaction of multilingual screen reader users with partially localised websites and to evaluate the impact of language selection by the user and the implementation of different localisation strategies on the overall usability of the test websites. The quantitative and qualitative data collected through the tests suggest that screen reader users generally prefer to browse in their native tongue and that they are used to find a way to change the language when needed. Users who browse the localised versions encounter more usability problems that are more often related to language than users who browse the original version. Finally, neither localisation degree proved satisfactory for screen reader user