MIS-LT: um método para avaliação de acessibilidade e comunicabilidade de sistemas interativos

Abstract

An interactive system with high accessibility and communicability provides many benefits to users' experience. These benefits are mainly related to visually impaired users so that they can achieve their goals in a given context of use. This work presents an analysis of the communication process of the Semiotic Engineering applied in the context of visually impaired people who use screen readers. The screen reader mediates the user interaction with the designer's metamessage, acting as a translator. However, the translation can often introduce problems that are not experienced by users who do not use screen readers to interact with the systems. Thus, this work presents the Semiotic Inspection Method Mediated by Screen Readers (SIM-SR) -- a proposal to adapt the Semiotic Inspection Method (SIM) to analyze the screen reader mediated interaction. The method includes new steps in the segmented SIM analysis to examine the screen reader translation and its contrast with the designer's intended metamessage. Three case studies were made from the application of SIM-SR in real Web systems to investigate and consolidate its applicability in interactive systems, revealing communicability and accessibility problems in the user interface that could impact people with visual impairments who use screen readers. The analysis performed using SIM-SR revealed several communicability and accessibility issues that lead to breakdowns in designer-to-user communication impacting how the designer intent is being conveyed to users, and their experience with the system. These results indicate that the SIM-SR identifies relevant problems of system accessibility and communicability, and contributes to existing set of evaluation methods.