Investigating Information Search by People with Cognitive Disabilities

The ability to gather information online has become increasingly important in the past decades. Previous research suggests that people with cognitive disabilities experience challenges when finding information on websites. Although a number of studies examined the impact of various design guidelines on information search by people with cognitive disabilities, our knowledge in this topic remains limited. To date, no study has been conducted to examine how people with cognitive disabilities navigate in different content structures. We completed an empirical study to investigate the impact of different search methods and content structures on the search behavior of people with cognitive disabilities. 23 participants with various cognitive disabilities completed 15 information search tasks under three conditions: browsing a website with a deep structure (4 × 4 × 4 × 4), browsing a website with a broad structure (16 × 16), and searching through a search engine. The results suggest that the participants overwhelmingly preferred the search engine method to the two browsing conditions. The broad structure resulted in significantly higher failure rates than the search engine condition and the deep structure condition. The causes of failed search tasks were analyzed in detail. Participants frequently visited incorrect categories in both the deep structure and the broad structure conditions. However, it was more difficult to recover from incorrect categories on the lower-level pages in the broad structure than in the deep structure. Under the search engine condition, failed tasks were mainly caused by difficulty in selecting the correct link from the returned list, misspellings, and difficulty in generating appropriate search keywords.