Accessibility and Usability Evaluation of Digital Library Article Pages

Abstract

This study aims to present an exploratory study about the accessibility and usability evaluation of digital library article pages. For this purpose, four widely known digital libraries (DLs), namely Science Direct, Institute of Electric and Electronic Engineering Xplore, Association for Computing Machinery, and SpringerLink, were examined. In the first stage, article web interfaces of these selected DLs were analyzed based on standard web guidelines using automatic evaluation tools to assess their accessibility. In the second stage, to evaluate the usability of these web interfaces, eye-tracking experiments with 30 participants were conducted. Obtained results of the analysis show that article pages of digital libraries are not of free of accessibility and usability problems. Overall, this study highlights accessibility and usability problems of digital library article interfaces, and these findings can provide the feedback to web developers in making their article pages more accessible and usable for their users.