Assessing the Listenability of Social Media Text for Blind Users

What is it about?

Social media has become a dominant medium for people all over the world to communicate and consume information. However, language use in social media is highly informal, with posts and tweets typically containing numerous out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words such as acronyms, slang, wordplays, phonetic substitutions, and abbreviations. Our research investigates how the presence of such OOV words impacts the comprehensibility of social media content for blind users, who consume this content by listening to it, typically with the help of assistive technology such as a screen reader. This work also examines how the OOV words are voiced out by a screen reader, given that many of these ‘manufactured’ words do not have any corresponding standard pronunciations.

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Photo by Erik Lucatero on Unsplash

Photo by Erik Lucatero on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Given the growing importance of social media, all content on social media must be accessible to people of all abilities, including blind people who aurally interact with the content via screen reader assistive technology. While prior works have focused on assessing and improving the accessibility of visual content such as images and videos on social media, they have largely ignored that the social media text itself can be practically inaccessible due to the presence of numerous out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. Our study shows that blind users indeed struggle to comprehend social media posts laden with OOV words, as their go-to screen readers are unable to properly narrate these words. Our findings, comprising a detailed analysis of how different kinds of OOV words are narrated by different screen readers and the corresponding impact on the listening comprehension of blind users, can potentially inform the design and development of future comprehensive accessibility solutions for social media.