Usable Web-based Calendaring for Blind Users

While a calendar is generally thought of as a visual representation of a day, week, month or year; in its simplest form, a calendar consists of scheduled events with associated dates, times, locations and descriptions. In this paper we describe the design and evaluation of a web-based calendar prototype for blind individuals who use screen readers to access their computers and the Internet. With our new web-based calendar prototype, the successful completion across common calendar tasks improved from a mean of 43 per cent across other web-based email calendars to a mean of 96 per cent in our prototype calendar. This empirical study illustrates the types of simple design changes that can dramatically improve the level of access and usability of dynamic, web-based calendar interfaces for blind users.