Assessing the Usability of Electronic Theses and Dissertations for Blind Users

Abstract

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) provide broad access to student scholarship and support the long-term preservation and dissemination of academic research. Despite their central role in digital libraries, little is known about their usability for people with blindness or visual impairments (BVIs) who access scholarly documents using screen readers. We address this gap through a mixed-methods study in which BVI participants completed representative ETD interaction tasks followed by semi-structured interviews. Our findings reveal a substantial gap between accessibility and usability. Although the evaluated ETDs were technically accessible, participants struggled with information-seeking and navigation tasks and experienced considerable cognitive load, even with AI assistance. These challenges reflected limited screen reader AI capabilities, fragmented workflows, and poor integration between screen readers and more capable third-party AI systems. Based on these findings, we derive design considerations for assistive technologies that better support usable interaction with long-form scholarly documents.