Usability Evaluation of Facebook and Instagram by Visually Impaired People

Introduction/Importance of Study: Social networking websites have become the main medium for communication, information sharing, entertainment, buying/selling, and various other purposes. People of every age use social networking websites, and their usage is increasing daily, especially in current circumstances. People with different abilities also used social networking websites, but each set of users had their requirements for using these websites. Visually impaired people use computers and the web with the help of screen reading tools e. g.; jaws, and NVDA. Screen reading tools read a web page sequentially, which was a time-consuming process. The major problem with screen reading tools came while reading visual content. Screen reading tools only read the alternate texts of non-visual content behind their tag. This research focuses on the usability of social networking websites for visually impaired people. Two of the most commonly used social networking websites, Facebook and Instagram, were selected for the usability evaluation. Accessibility, efficiency, and effectiveness were the metrics of usability, which were evaluated in this study. Novelty statement: A consolidated set of guidelines specific to social networking websites were presented in which some new guidelines were also proposed for Facebook. A mock interface was developed based on the proposed guidelines for Facebook. Material and Method: `For the evaluation of usability, a controlled experiment was conducted with 28 visually impaired people in which 16 participants evaluated Facebook and 12 evaluated Instagram to find the usability problems faced by visually impaired people. Result and Discussion: Results show that Instagram was as easy to use as compared to Facebook when used by visually impaired people with the help of screen reading tools. Concluding Remarks: Results showed that Facebook was difficult to use in comparison to Instagram. Thus, new guidelines were proposed for Facebook, and based on the guidelines, a prototype was proposed