Call for Volunteers: Universal Design Study on Digital Libraries

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Contact: Melissa Davey Castillo   castil44@uwm.edu  

Sponsored by: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in partnership with American Council of the Blind, Association for the BVI, Blind Service Association, Learning Ally, National Federation of the Blind-WI Chapter, and Vision Forward, Milwaukee Public Libraries, Milwaukee Public Museum, and Milwaukee Art Museum

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and its partners (including American Council of the Blind, Association for the BVI, Blind Service Association, Learning Ally, National Federation of the Blind-WI Chapter, and Vision Forward, Milwaukee Public Libraries, Milwaukee Public Museum, and Milwaukee Art Museum) are collaborating to develop digital library design guidelines on accessibility, usability, and utility for blind and visually impaired (BVI) users. The project will benefit the approximately 20.6 million Americans with significant vision loss who cannot use digital libraries effectively because of the libraries' sight-centered design.

The three-year project will create design guidelines on accessibility, usability and utility to address the help-seeking situations that blind users experience when interacting with digital libraries. The goal: to make digital libraries more universally accessible.

The diary group will complete a pre-questionnaire via Qualtrics online to determine their eligibility for the study. The diary group will complete an orientation task (10 minutes, 20 minutes total) and 2 search tasks for each Digital Library (DL).The digital libraries are the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, DPLA, and HathiTrust. Volunteers will be asked to conduct a specific information and exploratory search task, 15 minutes per task, 30 minutes per DL (1 hr total). Participants will have two (2) weeks to complete the tasks and record as many help-seeking situations encountered in each DL in a diary (Word document). Following the use of each DL, the diary participants will complete a post-questionnaire via Qualtrics (30 minutes per questionnaire, 1 hr total). Follow-up interviews will be incorporated to provide clarification on diary or post-questionnaire responses (10 minutes). The whole process takes about 2 hours 30 minutes (not including diary writing time).

Each participant will be offered $100 for their participation of the study. Please contact Melissa Davey Castillo <castil44@uwm.edu> if interested.