Increasing usability of search engine interfaces for the blind

Since search engines have become an indispensable tool for retrieving information from the Internet, simple and effective interaction is important for anyone wishing to explore a web page. Navigating is especially difficult for those blind individuals who navigate via screen reader. We believe that an appropriately designed user interface is crucial for improving accessibility and usability, and in a previous phase of our research we proposed a set of specific guidelines that would improve interaction with search engine user interfaces. In this paper we applied our guidelines to a commercial search engine, modifying the Google interface source code while maintaining the same graphical layout. For a better understanding of how screen readers read a web page and how our changes improve readability via assistive technology, we offer two scenarios in which two blind persons were assigned the same task. We then show the two individuals attempting to perform the task, one with the original and the other with the modified Google interface, and briefly compare the two scenarios.