Impact of Accessibility and Usability Barriers on the Emotions of Blind Users in Responsive Web Design

With the emergence of new web design trends, as the Responsive Web design, new problems concerning users experience emerges, such as the importance of investigating the impact of these new web trends on blind user's experience. Thus, this work identifies and ranks the emotional impact and barriers faced by blind and sighted users experience when interacting with responsive and non-responsive web designs. Six websites were selected, three responsive and three non-responsive. The users performed six tasks in each website. To understand the emotional responses of blind and sighted users, we used the Affect Grid Method to classify user's emotions during interactions. We also applied statistical tests during data analysis. The results show that non-responsive websites presented a higher percentage of pleasant emotions and high excitement when compared to responsive ones. We also found evidence that barriers faced by users during interactions that impacted on the emotions of users have been triggered by non-compliance to WCAG guidelines. The main impacts identified in this study were the barriers to accessibility, navigability and content faced by blind users caused by the lack of robust web content.