Transcript No. 2

 

Digital Library I

1.1. Exploration 1 begins at 00:03:37

So we’re on the Library of Congress webpage, which we know nothing about. So the first thing might be to start reading it. But there’s often lots of links and stuff at the top, which we can go back to, but first let’s see what the text says on the page. <N> So we know there’s a search button, we’re pressing N, which should be bringing us to the text, rather than to..that should be a link. Digital collection. Let’s read a little and see if this make sense. <Arrows down> No, it’s giving us crap. <Headings> (So what do you think?) It took me to links to..Lincoln or whatever. Just when I had text, right below text there were links so that wasn’t going to give me any information. <Reads info about page> So now we have some text, it’s telling us a little about the page. Insert Down arrow to read. <Insert Down Arrow> So we’re basically, what they’re doing is giving you an alphabetical list of categories and every one of those categories has a link. So that you can click on and get to that collection, it looks like. So now without reading the whole page, I got a generalized idea of what they do, I’ll just test it by tabbing to links. <Tabs> Now, you notice the tabs give you how many items you can view on the link but the tabs don’t tell you what that category is. So let’s say you’re looking at that when you have to go up with your arrow key. <Arrows up collections> So it’s 3 up arrows before you find out it’s Afghanistan. And we hit Tab twice to go past Afghanistan to see if our theory is correct. <Tabs> (So what are your perceptions?) Well, what’s always nice on a webpage is if they have something at the top, like how it works, and you can kind of intuitively figure that out when you get to the text. But now to be fair, let’s go back to the top of the page. <Tabs to skip to main content link> Okay, that’s always a good one to have because if you hit that you can go to the main content. But since we don’t know what’s there, this is a new page, we would do that in later uses of the page probably. We’ll tab through a little and see what we get for links. <Tabs> Menu. <Tabs> Well, we have no idea what 17 of 17 means but digital search combo box would imply that you can press Alt Down Arrow and open that combo box but that’s probably misnamed. It’s probably an edit box that opens to forms mode if you tab once more. So let’s see if it’s correct. (You think it’s confused to you?) Yeah, I think it’s misnamed. It says combo box but I bet you it’s an edit box. But let’s find out. <Opens combo box> It says expanded. <Tab to edit. Shift Tab back to combo box. Shift tab to LOC. Tab to combo box> It says combo box but if you open it up nothing happen. So you tab once more.. <Tab to edit box> And there’s the edit box. The real key to any webpage, if you know what you’re going to search for, is that edit box. And the combo box doesn’t have any meaning that I can figure to it. <Tab to search button> And they have a search button. Sometimes you have to tab to the search button to make the search work and something, like on Google, you just type in your search and press Enter. Now, there should be a link before the search that says search tips that would tell you the kind of syntax you can use, ok. For example, is it like Google where it searches first word to last word, if you put it in quotes it searches for the exact phrase. You know, how are their search criteria set up so that you can make your search done the most effectively. Lord knows what Boolean expressions are, sounds like soup. So there’s the key to the webpage right there. <Tab> Why would there be a link to the Library of Congress if that’s where we were? <Tabs> Subscribe to what? <Tabs> Now here’s all that crap. <Tabs to featured content> Now we’re in that featured content stuff. <Tabs through features content. Headings> I didn’t search for anything. Why is heading giving me a search? <Headings to refine filters> (You have 3 minute.) You can go to headings, this is very handy because it’s a broad jump through the page. <Headings. Wrap to top> [chime] Ok, so we went through the headings to get a better sense of the big sections of the page. And we do have wonderment about this link to same page…what the difference is. So we have a couple minutes, let’s find out. <Tabs to edit box> Looks like the same thing. So what is the purpose of that link if it brings you right back to where you were before you got there. It’s a loop. Ok, now we have a little idea of the page. I’m sure I will regret not doing more later. (You want to stop?) In the process of the exercise if I need more, but right now I don’t know what more I need till I know what I have to do. Does that logic make sense? It’s kind of like searching. Well, searching is great if you know what you’re looking for.

 

Exploration 1 ends at 00:12:04

 

1.2. Post-interview begins at 00:12:15

(What approach did you use?) Can’t say I’m familiar yet. But when I got to the page I first wanted to get a sense of what does the house look like. So I wanted to know the text material on the page because that’s more likely to tell me how it works. And when I finally got to text it was alphabetical by subject and each little…we have this kind of collection and there’s so many pictures, and a link to click on to get to the first 21 pictures in that category, whatever Afghanistan, Africa, Abraham, it was listed alphabetically. (To summarize, you tried to find the task material but you only found alphabetical subjects.) It took me about 2 presses of the N key, which is the JAWS key to search for next text to get to what I was looking for. And once I knew that then I went to the top of the page and said, ok, let me look at the links that we can tab to on this page and I happened to find the search that way, I found a little misleading combo box, which if you press the Alt Down Arrow does not open a combo box. Didn’t play with the menu button, wondered about that. But found the search tab. So then I tabbed through to get a sense of a few more of the links and then I went back to the top of the page and hit H for headings to see what the headings were on the webpage, which gave me large categories of stuff to look at. So the page looks like it’s organized very well. But I went from smallest to biggest, first text, then links, then headings, rather than the other way around, because it made the big jumps made more sense, when I made the little jumps.

 

(Challenges?) Well I haven’t really explored it yet. That’s a post text question in that we just got a sense of what the page looks like. We found a few wasted links, we found one that brings you in a circle. Whether I know what I need to know or not will be proven by what I can and can’t do on the page. So I can’t say that it’s difficult because I don’t know what I don’t know yet. (I can say that maybe the combo box because you said–) That seems to be a common one. I don’t know if it’s mislabeling or if it’s a JAWS problem but normally Alt Down Arrow should open a combo box but often a combo box really isn’t a combo box. I don’t know why it says combo box but I’ve learned to be suspicious of those in terms of if Alt Down Arrow doesn’t work, big deal. And I did wonder about that menu link but I didn’t have a chance to…I might explore that later. Though I couldn’t figure when I looked at the website, a menu of what? It looked to me like you could search in the search bar and there was a tab to narrow your results if your results were too wide, which you don’t have to know everything about a website to use a website. You have to know enough to get done what you want to get done and then sometimes you learn more as you need to learn more. Like I didn’t do a search for Help.

 

(What features were useful?) Only ones with text descriptions. Telling me what the picture is of and if there’s a way for me to download it so that I can insert it into a paper or document, I suppose. I’ve never done that but I went to school on a slate and stylus rather than powerpoint presentations, which I find brutally hard to take notes on in class. You almost have to have the powerpoint and then put your notes in the margins, it seems to me. I’m used a lecture and taking notes by hand and synthesizing what the professor said, and I find that old school note taking is very difficult in the new school.

 

(Desired features?) It’s nice to have a summary screen. Let’s say a link at the top that says how it works and you go in there and it would tell you, here’s all that detailed stuff. But a basic summary, ok, this is the Library of Congress, there’s an edit box that you can use, you can search for documents, pictures, and there’s all kinds of categories that..like Abraham Lincoln, Afghanistan, listed alphabetically, that you can go to, I’m going to guess, you could go to do a find. Go to, let’s say you wanted housing, you could search for housing and then you find that link with the images and I bet you if you opened up that housing link you would find another search box. So it’d be nice if it had a little ‘this is how it works.’ (To summarize, information about this website and how it works.)

 

Post-interview ends at 00:18:21

 

1.3. Task 1 begins at 00:20:15

So it said search loc.gov, which is an unnecessary verbiage there. What the hell else would you be searching on the LoC webpage. (Rosa Parks.) No, my point is that it says search loc.gov, why not just say search. I’m going to put Rosa Parks in quotes because I want Rosa Parks, not Rosa and Parks. <Types ‘”rosa parks’”. Tab. Space to enter Search button>

 

<Headings> Now I’m trying to find my results. Wow. <Headings> (What is your perception?) Well, it’s a challenge in that it’s got everything on it because there’s 7,000 documents here and 2,000 of this there, so you could learn everything you wanted to know about Rosa Parks if you knew what you were looking for but now that you know there’s that much on Rosa Parks we’re going to do a Control Home to go back to top of page and we’re going to see if we can get to an edit box without having to Alt Tab back a page, because that will save time. <Arrows down> Okay, it finds our search so we don’t need to Alt Left Arrow back a page. Every page has a search on it. So now we’ll wonder, will it overwrite the search. <No word list created> Now, did you hear that? It said..it took W as a command rather than as a letter to type so you have to tab once <Tab> Oh, we’ve got a Bing search. <Top of file> Go to the top of file because it’s getting us into stuff. Search again and it’s not behaving. <Back a page>

 

So now we moved back a page because we know that will work. Now, in JAWS, you have something called Forms mode, which allows you to not use letters to do things. So it didn’t go into Forms mode automatically, which it’s supposed but it doesn’t always do. <Tab> (A problem on this website?) No, this a JAWS problem. It’s not a website problem. But if you tab to search button and then go back, then it goes into Forms mode and you can type. <Types in edit box ‘when did Rosa Parks join the naacp?’. Tab. Space bar to enter search button>

 

When did Rosa Parks join the NAACP question mark. <Headings> Now, somewhere on this page should be our answer. So we’ll do a Control F for find. <JAWS Find> We’ll look for the word join because Rosa Parks may show up a lot more than join. <Types ‘join’. Enter. Wrap to top> [chime] Well. I think we didn’t get our answer. Because it went to the bottom of the page and back to the top and stopped at the edit box, which means that somehow it didn’t like that question. <Tabs> Well, there’s a combo box, it says collapsed digital collections. I don’t know if it would expand but you would think it would be searching digital collections so that would be good. <Tabs through search edit boxes. Arrows down> I’m down arrowing, kind of thinking as I go. <JAWS Find. Types ‘results’. Enter> Let’s look for the word results. There we are, it says heading level 2 results 1 of 1. So it’s not going to tell, well, let’s look at our arrows and see if it tells us. <Arrows down to digital collections> Well, no, it just gives general…<Tabs to digital collections and View boxes> I’m going forward and back with the tab and shift tab to see if I can find something I can link to to give me that result. <Arrows up. Headings> I went up with the up arrow a couple times to get above the headings to see if there two there, I didn’t want to click on the wrong one, so then I pressed H for heading, it said results. <Enter> So I pressed Enter to go to that result. Is it going to do it? <Reads page> That sounds like the exact same thing I was at so it wouldn’t hurt to hit it again but it doesn’t say visited link, but it does indicate you can click on it…<Enter> And nothing happens. (Can you explain what you’re feeling here?) Well, what should work isn’t working so it’s something I don’t understand. And when I understand what I don’t understand I will be able to understand it. But until then if you do the wrong thing, you try the next thing. So let’s see what text search gives us. This is just normal. This is not a level of particular frustration in the sense of you have to understand you’re going through every webpage is a maze and once you understand the maze you’ll begin to be able to utilize the maze much better. But when you’re viewing a webpage once word at a time you are walking through a maze. And so you just have to keep walking through a maze. <Headings> Why. <Headings> Out of what. Original format. <Arrows down to refine results> (Can you tell me what you’re thinking?) I’m exploring again because I don’t see what I expected to see. So I’m hitting N for text because the quickest way to get relevant information it seems is to look for the text about it. And then I’m using the up arrow to see what’s above the text, just to see what’s around it. Because since I’m in a maze I have to figure out the little box I’m in. If you think of it like a video game. <N> Now you notice I’m hitting N, it’s going blank blank blank. <Arrows down refine results> Whatever that means. <Tabs down to bottom of page>  Follow you. I’m not going to follow you. That’s your social network things. So that’s obviously at the bottom of the page. It’s just going to waste my time. So let’s look for that edit box again. <Edit. Tab> Tab to go forward. <Shift Tab to edit box> [beep] Hear that little ‘pupp’? That tells you that now JAWS understands that it should allow you to edit. I wonder what quotes will do around the question. You shouldn’t need quotes. <Types over old text with ‘”when was Rosa Parks arrested”> Is it question quote or quote question, let me think. It’s question quote. <Types ‘arrested?”’. Tab. Enter>

 

<No results> Whoever thought I would use that English. <Tabs> Brought me to the top of this page and I’m getting in. <Tabs> It takes me back to the search… (What’s your perception?) Well, I better keep going because just because it shows you the same top of the page doesn’t mean that you’re on the same page. It means that the next page may use the same front door. <Headings to suggestions> Well, let me first of all go back and Alt Tab to the document and make sure I spelled Rosa Parks right because it says maybe I didn’t and I think I did. And I know my spelling so I will not be too proud to check. <Alt Tab to instructions. Checks text and spelling> Looks good to me. <Copies Rosa Parks text> I highlighted Rosa Parks and copied it to the clipboard. So now if I keep that on the clipboard I don’t have to keep typing it. Now I’m going back to the document. <Alt Tab to DL. Enters Help Page>

 

Let’s go to the help page. (Why you click the help page?) Because I’m not having any success and there’s a help page. Maybe the help page will be helpful. Whether it is or not I don’t know because it seem to me what I’m doing, <Insert Down Arrow> well first of all, it’s not allowing you to do an Insert Down Arrow and read the help page, which you’d think it would. <Tabs. Headings> Heading level 1 search help but it doesn’t give me any text. <Arrows down to read text> Ok, pretty standard stuff. (What do you think about this help?) I think it’s good basic help on searching. I think it’s useful. It does tell you the different kinds of searches you can do. We haven’t had a successful search yet doing what looks to be successful, which we wonder why, but maybe…well, oddly enough these are the questions you would just go to Google for anyway. Because we have much better luck here if you wanted to find Rosa Parks’ biography and then save a book. Let’s try that. (Time’s up.)

 

Task 1 ends at 00:35:23

 

1.4. Task 1 post-interview begins at 00:36:20

(What approach did you use?) I went to the search box and found I had to tab and then shift tab back to get the screen reader to understand that I was typing rather than navigating. And then I tried various searches and then looking for the word results, to get the results of my searches, and apparently this website does not give you answers in that way. What I’m thinking is on this website, if it’s a digital collection, my approach is wrong. What I really have to do is think of a book that would probably have my answer in it. Then find a way to download or to open that book and then look for text within the book. (Your approach is not matched to this website.) No, my approach is not matched to this website because my approach did not work. Now, would the other approach work? I don’t know. But it seem to me, if I’m a library, that there should be a way to ask a question, ie. like a ready reference question and then the library should get me the answer and then cite the source. So then if I want to download the source, I would know what book to download, rather than guessing the book and then looking for the question. Now, what it would take to do that is a little massive, I suppose. But Google does it. Because it would demand that the search engine searched within text. But that would be…that to me is how you, you know…

 

(Maybe go to the last question, so you want to add a kind of text search like Google, can I say that’s your desired feature?) In the best of all possible worlds. If it tells you what book to search for to get your answer then it’s a lot easier to get the right book. If all you need is that answer then, as I say, this may be something, we may be asking questions of this website that are much better asked of other things, because we’re asking it to find information where this website must be much better at finding pictures, documents or books. We’re asking it the wrong question.

 

(3 challenges?) I guess the first thing is understanding how the search works and the results are displayed. Two is again, how the website works. Thinking of it on my own thought at the end, if it’s a library, maybe I can’t ask it questions. Maybe I have to find books and within some book is the answer to my question. Then that should be explained because obviously the natural response at first encountering a website is to treat it’s search engine like Google because that’s what everybody knows. It’s become a standard like Xerox. You know, Xerox is now a word for copying. Kleenex had the same thing for tissue. It’s every company’s dream. But if that’s the approach that people are going to start with then you tell them this is how it works, rather than searching for a question. Search for results on a topic that may give you the answer to your question. Example, Rosa Parks biography. Rosa Parks biography would give me results that would likely answer those two questions because those questions would be in the biography. Or, for example, now that I think of it, Rosa Parks’ obituary. Because they are significant enough events in her life that they would probably be in her obituary. So you can’t ask this website direct questions. You have to ask this website where would I find the answer to my direct question. Again, more explanation of how to use it would help. Is that 3? (One is understanding search function, 2 is explaining the website, and 3 is the answers too long to provide interface like Google.) An interface that everybody knows. Also, where the search results are way down the page, you gotta look for the results for your search. Why not have them right next to your search rather than all the crap in between. Because every word has to be listened to because you can’t visually scan. (When you encountered a problem like that, do you think that’s helpful?) Control F is find, not forms, so it allows you search for the word results because I didn’t know where it was on the page. But it was obviously what I wanted but when I clicked on the link from show results it didn’t do anything, which was odd, though it said it was a link, it wasn’t. Because nothing changed. And nothing said visited link so I would know that I had been there before because JAWS will tell you when it passes a link that you have previously seen so you don’t keep going around and around and around without knowing you’re going around and around and around.

 

(You visited the help page. Was it helpful?) Given more time, that probably would have been more help. It certainly explained different kinds of searches but above that might have been more information about how to search in terms of….that may have been more useful. That would have been a good place to spend a half hour. And I don’t know how this works in employment situations where people need to go to new webpages and need to compete with sighted peers for productivity. It just takes you longer as a blind person and you have to be willing, exclamation point, bullet, punctuation, bold type, to spend much time on your own compensating for the speed at which your sighted peers can do so. You work harder for the same results so it’s your job to work harder. Editorial.

 

(Desired features?) No, I think that how it works we talked about. And you just gain experience with a page and plow ahead with it until you figure it out. It’s like a maze. But every webpage is like a maze. And you have to understand there’s nothing that sighted people can do to turn a webpage not into a maze. They can make it less mazey but you noticed they call it the web? I mean, what is a web but a maze for bugs. So you have to spend time with it. I could spend a day with this website. I could go to Google, which I didn’t think about until now, and say ‘how do I use the LoC website?’ and see what Google would give me for results that other people had figured out. Never invent the wheel. I didn’t think of that until now. Ask Google how to use this page and see what it says. That’s a great trick. It’s like if you ever get an error message or something, put the error message into Google. What does this mean?

 

Task 1 post-interview ends at 00:46:36

 

1.5. Task 2 begins at 00:49:52

(You can find as many items as you want.) <Tabs. Shift Tab. Enters edit box> [beep] I had to go forward and back to get that little..to get to the search box. Well, trusting my spelling, we’re going to Alt Tab back to the document. <Alt Tab to instructions. Copies ‘San Francisco’. Alt Tab to DL> Now I just went to the document and copied San Francisco to the clipboard to make sure I’d spell it correctly. Now I’m going to tab and shift tab back just to make sure I didn’t lose forms mode in JAWS, which I could. <Tab. Shift Tab> [beep] And I didn’t. <Pastes ‘San Francisco’. Types ‘earthquake’> Earthquake is one word, I hope. <Enter>

 

Now it said it twice. Why? <Arrows down> It gave the heading of the page twice which means you had to spend 10 seconds wasting your time. <Arrows down to digital collections> Combo box select. We’ll Alt Down Arrow. <Alt Down Arrow to open combo box> (Why are you trying to open combo box?) I thought if it said select, right above it it talked about search results so I hope if I open that combo box, which didn’t open, I would be able to select things to search from to get, because it said select and I thought that would maybe give me categories of things that I can look at. Because we’re looking for multimedia things on the San Francisco earthquake, so I thought that select box might tell me pictures, audio books, whatever, I’d be able to select something. But it didn’t work. Tab to Go button of Combo box. <Space bar to enter Go button of View combo box. N.N> See, N is not giving me-searching for text. <Arrows down. Opens toolbar window of browser> And when I down arrow I’m not getting anything. <Tabs to digital collections. F5 to refresh page> I’m going to try to refresh the page and see if we get text to look at. So when I refresh the page, I began to get things. <Arrows down to digital collections. Arrows down sort by combo box> Well, we can sort by title. Results title. <Tab. Enters Go button> We tabbed to Go button.

 

<N.N> Again, N doesn’t—it should give us text. <F5 to refresh> So we refresh the page. Why is it that you can’t navigate the text on a page until you refresh the page. Something’s wrong. Now I don’t know if it’s with this page, with this computer, with this browser, with JAWS or where it’s from. <Headings. Arrows down. Tabs to digital collections> (What’s your perception of this page?) It’s confusing as hell. Here’s Aaron Copeland. What the hell does Aaron Copeland have to do with the San Francisco earthquake. So let’s look for earth. We’ll look for quake. <JAWS Find. Types ‘quake’. Enter. Reads result at bottom of page> Well, that looks interesting. It’s got 17 films, it’s got films. You could click on that link maybe. And if they’re digitized you could maybe… Now why is all this stuff coming up on the San Francisco earthquake search is beyond me. It looks fascinating but nothing to do with San Francisco earthquake. And I think in our search we did put in…ah ha, our search was San Francisco earthquake without quotes so it’s giving us San Francisco and earthquake. <Shift Tab to earthquake result. Enters result>

 

<Stops speech> Now we’ve stopped the speech with the control key. We’re going to do Control F for Find <JAWS Find. Types ‘watch’. Enter> [chime] <No results. Tab> And JAWS, it went bang. And the arrows…we’re going to refresh the page now because obviously it didn’t like…<Y> And look, we have nothing. <Top of file> JAWS is saying ok but ok about what. Let me think of the JAWS command to read the current window. <Enters edit box> [beep] <Tabs> So it’s giving us back to search page. We were trying—I was looking for watch so we could watch a movie. But that didn’t work. You’d think some of those movies would be digitized. So now we found the search thing again so put in quotes. <Types “San Francisco earthquake”. Tab. Space bar to enter search button>

 

So now we refine the search to San Francisco earthquake within quotes. Control F for results. <JAWS Find. Types ‘results’. Enter. Tabs> So we found one. What we want to remove it from. What that means. <Tabs to results combo box> Sorting options after the first link. <Tabs to results> There’s a book. So we found our search results and we found a bunch of things that we could look at. <Tabs through results> What if you click on it? <Enters film link> We found sources but can we watch them? (Why did you click these items?) Why pick that one? Because I was going to have a bunch of them to pick from and when I got to the third film I said, rather than finding what else I got, let’s see if we can watch a movie, because I got curious. I could have kept looking but I wanted to see… <Arrows down> Now nothing happens though. You know, it tells you if it’s not digitized you can’t watch it but I was hoping you could watch it. <JAWS Find. Types ‘watch’. Enter. No results> [chime] So it doesn’t look like you can watch it. <Escape to close pop up window. Back to previous page of results. Types V to look for visited link but is in URL window going through previous websites. Tabs through URL sites> Now I hit V for visited link and that didn’t work. <F5 to refresh. Forward page to result. F5 to refresh> I’m going to try to get back to the page we were on because it looks like the same page. <Tabs to title> That was what we’re trying to watch. It says digital collection. <Expands menu> JAWS key which is the Alt key, Insert Alt M, to move to the element expand, I don’t know what exactly that means but it sounds like it’s worth playing with. (Can you explain what you’re experiencing here?) Confusion. I don’t know, there’s a number of things to do, it feels like we’re close, but we’d like to watch a movie to prove that it worked. That we were able to get a search, we did better when we put it in quotes. We were able to find links to click on. It said digital collection, which means it should be available, and then we went to this menu thing to see if it would help because we couldn’t get it to play. (You have 3 minutes.) <Arrows down menu items> Now there’s a link About, which if we had more time would probably tell us some cool stuff. But see you have to find that menu button on that page and then open it. <Enters About link> I think it will tell us all about the Library of Congress. <Arrows down to text> Fascinating but I don’t think right now. <Back to previous page. Tabs to title> What if I right click it? <opens browser menu> (Can you tell me what you’re trying to do?) I’m trying to figure out how to get this film to play so I tried to right click it see if there was any ‘save this file’ or something. Didn’t find anything useful but I thought, oh maybe that’ll work since whatever else I’ve tried hasn’t worked. So often you can right click on something and get something done. <Enter> Now we’re hitting Enter on the Actuality Film and again, nothing happens. <Tabs forward and back over title of result – not a link> Right, the focus stayed on the same place, which tells you it should be a link. But when you clicked on it nothing happened so the left click didn’t work, which is the Enter key. We looked at the right click, which is the Shift F10, which is the context key just to make sure there’s not a…<Opens browser window for tabs. Escape. Tabs> And there’s nothing. (What are your thoughts?) My thoughts is I’m in the dead end of the maze. We are close but we don’t know why we’re not making it work. Because if you click, you would think, if you clicked on a movie, you should at least get a D1 open or save this file or it should automatically play like it would on YouTube, but it does nothing and the tab key is the Windows command to move to next link, and of course if it’s a link you should be able to press Enter on it to activate it. (Time’s up for task 2.)

 

Task 2 ends at 01:05:25

 

1.6. Task 2 post-interview begins at 01:06:17

(What approaches did you take?) I went back to the search window and searched for San Francisco earthquake without the quotes and then with the quotes to see if that would narrow the search to something effective. We found a number of links to click on but when we clicked on those links nothing happened, which was a mystery to me why they were links. We then tried right click, the context menu to see if that would give a way to save the links and that didn’t work. So we found many links that would be appropriate movies and books and different films, etc. and they said they were digitized. Well, it said so and so link digital library, which I would assume means it’s in the digital library. Silly me. So then we begin to explore to figure out what am I doing wrong, why is this not working. Because it’s not working and when something doesn’t work there’s something the end user isn’t doing right. The reason they’re not doing it right is because they don’t know what it is or how to do it right. I always tell people, if you find two things that don’t make sense, look for the third thing and those two things will begin to make sense.

 

(3 challenges?) Didn’t do it correctly. Wasn’t able to access the material. Was able to get close, I think, but was not able to make anything download or play, which is the bottom line. And I don’t know why. We seem to be good at the search and not good at the access. Or better at the search but we’re doing something wrong about the access but I think the next exercise..we stumbled into that accessibility link which just said list, which is how we got to a list of things. I don’t know if you can click on that link but I would assume you can. Maybe we’ll read that. (You can say your problem was only one because you couldn’t play?) Yeah, it’s kind of like the surgery was successful but the patient died. We did everything right but it didn’t work. (You spent a lot of time to play the video–) Yeah, that’s the point. The point isn’t just to find stuff. Here we have a list of things, we’ve got a search, we’ve got all these matches, we’ve got 15 things it said. Well, but if you can’t access the things, what’s the point?

 

(You said when you have those problems you hit Control F and tried to see the menu, and also using the Tab, and use the combo box, do you think any feature was helpful to you?) Well, it looked like that menu bar, we actually got that one combo box to open, that there may be some help and some useful things that helped us find things. It does sound like the link navigation with the tab key, the heading navigation, also the list navigation, might be helpful, but again, the problem is a little bit like the problem in using JAWS itself. It’s so massive, ok, that you can’t find what you want. It’s there somewhere. It’s here, but we’re here. And that’s the same problem we have with this—we’re dealing with the whole Library of Congress now, because it does everything and in many ways it does nothing until you know the key to make it work. Once you learn the website, learn how it works, I imagine it’s just dandy. But from not knowing the website to understanding how to get stuff out of it is a long step. (Do you think those features were useful?) I think it’s inherent to websites. They are web after all. And you’re viewing a web from the point of the fly. The fly does not understand the extent of the web. The fly understands the space in which it is caught. And you’re asking the fly to understand the web rather than being able to look at the entire web and find the fly. Maybe that’s the best way of thinking of how a blind person and sighted person views a webpage. Actually, that’s pretty good. Keep that. Because, again, you’re looking at a webpage one word at a time. There is no right, there is no left, there is no up, there is no down, and I’m the kind of person, and..there’s two kinds of travelers-there’s route travelers and there are area travelers. If you give me a route I will fail to travel. If you allow me to understand a map I will create a route within that map and travel it successfully. Now that’s not a better or a worse way than a route traveler. You guys know drivers the same way. Give them one block of detour and they’re lost because they’re route travelers. And other people are totally lost until they have a map and understand the area in which they function in. Which is why I was all those questions about coming into the building from Maryland because if we were on Newport that didn’t make any sense. If we were on a sidewalk going into the complex north of Hartford and south of Newport then that right hand turn made sense. Because I need the map to understand space. And I have no map of this website in my head. So I am the fly in the web rather than the person outside the web seeing the fly.

 

(Desired features?) Again, we come back to how it works. This is what you do, you use the search function. When you find something you want, this is what you do to get access to it because apparently clicking on it doesn’t give you access to it, how it works. So I can make that map in my head.

 

Task 2 post-interview ends at 01:14:31

 

 Digital Library 2

2.1. Exploration begins at 01:51:00

Now I like that the search is right at the top. <Arrows down over menu> Let’s go to the page and look for the word help. <JAWS Find. Types ‘help’. Enter> [chime] Let’s see what help says. <Enters Help link>

 

<Arrows down> Now that’s a bunch of garbage that we don’t need so we’re going to hit N for text. <N> Until we get the text that we can read. <N. Arrows down text. Enters Learn More link>

 

It said to pay particular attention to this so ok I’ll pay particular attention to this. <Arrows down. Headings down page> Underline search box? <Reads page. Arrows down to bottom> Now I’m going down. Ok, now one of the things it did say on this page was to do anything you had to set up an account so I wonder if you need to set up an account for this to work. <Back to previous page>

 

(What are your thoughts at this time about this webpage?) I think the help is very good but I do think it looks like you have to…<Back to homepage. Tabs> We’re going back to the top of the page. The Alt Left and Right arrows didn’t seem to work like expected. Unless it kept bringing it back to the middle of the page cause I was trying to get back to where we started. It does sound like you have to set up an account but there’s nothing on the top page that asks for a username or password. Which is a mystery. How can you have the…well let’s look for account. <JAWS Find. Types ‘account’. No results> [chime] Nope. So I don’t know. There’s nothing about account so I have no idea what they’re talking about setting up an account for because if there is an account… We’ll look for the word password. <JAWS Find. Types ‘password’. Enter. No results> [chime] So there’s nothing that says password either so I’m just assuming it’s hooey that you really don’t have to set up an account. But why do they talk about one? Man, this is hard work. Not for you, right. Well, how many guinea pigs you guys got? (Guinea pigs?) Students, subjects. (32) As I say, guinea pigs. Yeah, we had a language challenge. We’re all guinea pigs, subjects. (Sorry I missed it the first time.) No no no, it’s a new language. Come one. The hardest thing to understand when you learn a language are analogies and puns. And those are the real challenges in learning any language because they don’t relate to previous knowledge of the language except for use of it over the years. So you can lock that one away. So there’s the mystery of the account, not solved. But we will assume since there is nothing on this page about an account that we don’t need one. Or that if it does, it’ll tell us, you haven’t logged in, you can’t get this. (Do you want to try this more?) I think we can go. Let me just look at the headings. <Headings. Wrap to top.> [chime] <Arrows down to edit box> [beep] I don’t know what regions would mean. I suppose I can tell you where we can go to check out something. <Headings> You guys have got such neat websites in your studies. That whole thing on Vel Phillips last time was just fascinating. That was so good. And these two websites are good. <Headings. Arrows down DPLA links> What? Why are there these names in here? Why would Chad Nelson be… DPLA by county and state, there are these names popped in the middle of this website. Why? Like, I know him. I mean, there’s got to be more than one Chad Nelson in the world. Why is that name sitting there? And it happens again. <Arrows down through page> (1 minute left.) <Arrows down menu> I have no idea what this link screen name is but I don’t think it’s important. Ok, I obviously have missed something really critical given the experience of the last website, but, as you say, this isn’t how I do, it’s what can be done.

 

Exploration ends at 02:00:45

 

2.2. Post-interview begins at 02:0:45

(This time you started from the help page.) I learned a little from the last time. One of the things about artificial intelligence is it learns from experience which is not so different than actual intelligence.

 

(Main 3 challenges?) I like that the search is right at the top. It looks to be very clean in terms of how it’s organized with all the clutter and crap at the bottom. Twitter and facebook and linked, whatever. As I say, it talks about having an account but there’s no indication of how to make an account or why you’d want to or why you should or why you need to. So that’s confusing. And as you’re reading down the page all of a sudden these names show up with nothing around them. Why is this name here? So there’s some things that just don’t relate to anything and don’t make sense. Some of the links might be that way, I’m not sure.

 

(Desired feature?) The help was helpful. Talked about how you can search. That was a big thing on the website. I don’t know why you’d want to search by state or by county, where stuff was. I’m assuming you would do that so you could go get it but it doesn’t indicate that. (ringing) Let me get that. Let me pause for a second…

 

Post-interview ends at 02:02:39

 

2.3. Task 1 begins at 02:06:27

In the search box we are. So we’re going to tab. <Tab> And Shift Tab back to hear that pop. <Shift Tab to enter edit box> [beep] <Apostrophe. Quote> We hit the wrong key. <Types ‘“1918 epidemic”’. Tab. Space bar to enter search button> Press the button.

 

<No results> Now I searched for 1918 epidemic thinking there isn’t any other epidemic. <Arrows down> I’m arrowing down the page because I want to see what it looks like. I’m seeing all these social media things. <Headings to no results> Well, fine. <Shift Tab to top of page. N. Back to previous page.>  (Can you tell me what you did?) I’m trying to get the search cleared and then I went back to the search and wonder why it doesn’t give me any results so we’re going to go to our instruction page. <Alt Tab to instructions. Reads instructions. Copies ‘Spanish Influenza in 1918’> I copied Spanish Influenza in 1918. Put it on the clipboard. <Alt Tab to DL. Tab. Shift Tab to enter edit> [beep] <Pastes text> Pasted it. <Types quotation marks around text> I put Spanish Influenza 1918 in quotes. <Tab. Space bar to enter search button>

 

<JAWs Find> Find for results. <Types ‘results’. Enter. Arrows down and up> I thought it said something so I went back up to check. (What’s your impression of this page?) Well, if you search it looks ok I would think you’d get a lot more results than you get and I wonder why because you should have gotten a huge batch on both of these. So that doesn’t make sense, if you’ve got 16 million sources… <Arrows down to combo boxes. Arrows down to result graphic> Now what the hell does that mean? There’s a graphic with a graphic number but it says nothing about if that’s a link to an article or what that is. So we’ll look around it and see if the arrows tell us anything. <Arrows down. Tabs to result. Enters first result postcard link>

 

(Can you tell me why you picked this one?) It looked to be the only one there. It had 2 results and then it went to postcards and..but then when I clicked on this link it went to postcards. You’d think right below the results would be the links to the results. But apparently not. So this is odd. So let’s go back to where we were. <Back to previous page>

 

<Tabs> Well, whatever that is, that’s one of the matches. <Enters result link>

 

We haven’t gotten anything yet. <Reads page> Well, we do we have java script? We don’t know because we don’t know this computer but…<Headings. Tabs> View resource link, well let’s try. <Enters View Resource tab>

 

(Can you tell me why you clicked that?) I wanted to see if they worked. And it said full text so I thought we’d get a book or something from Utah State University. We got postcards or something but at least we know it works. <Arrows down and up in collection> Login? <Enters login link>

 

Oh, ok, so that takes us to the University of Utah where we have to log in. We don’t want to do that. Cause we’re not going to go there again. <Back to previous page>

 

<Arrows down> Now we can’t go back with the Alt Left Arrow isn’t bringing us back to the home page. So we have to search for home. <JAWS Find. Types ‘home’. Enter. Enters home link to Mountain West Digital Library homepage>

 

Now this has gotten us not home. It’s gotten us to the home of Mountain facebook. (I’m going to go back to the..) The left and right arrow is not working. <Interviewer navigates back to DPLA homepage>

 

So what we are trying to do is not working. Why is that? (There’s the homepage again.) <Types ‘”1918 epidemic”’. Tab. Space to enter search button>

 

<No results> Hope I spelled that right. Do a Control F for results. <JAWS Find. Types ‘results’. Enter. Arrows down> Down arrowing. <Arrows down to bottom. Arrows up. F2> (Can you tell us what you’re doing right now?) I’m trying to get back to..I want to get to the search thing so I can clear it and type in something else. It didn’t want to let me do it because I thought of the F2 rename key as an edit shortcut key and it didn’t work. <Shift Tabs to top> I had to go to the search button and then go back again so JAWS would know I was in the edit box. <Deletes search text. Alt Tab to Word. Reads instructions. Copies ‘Spanish Influenza’. Alt Tab to DL> Go back to the text. Copy the text. That way the spelling is right. <Pastes text> Paste it. <Tab. Space to enter search>

 

Hit Enter on the space bar. Search for results. <JAWS Find. Types ‘results’. Enter. Arrows down to results. Tabs> It’s telling me matches, numbers of matches, but I have to go up and see what the matches are. It says 21 per page but then it’s telling you these different categories of matches. Combo box relevance and it’s got these numbers and it should be at the…<Tabs> See, as you tab through the links, it’s not making sense. And if you rearrange the sorting it’s not going to make any…<Arrows down to results. Enters first result link>

 

<Arrows down top links. Headings to bottom> See all these text links, it says headings, it should be Hs rather than N for text. They should come up under H for heading. Should be text. <headings> The text should be here. Because it said so. <Arrows down to bottom of page> (Can you tell me your impression of this page?) There should be a textbook up here because it said text excerpts. We clicked on that and we’re not seeing any text excerpts, we’re seeing webpage. So how can we answer the question about if we don’t have the text because this report should have it. <JAWS Find. Types ‘causes’. Enter. No results> [chime] <Escape> See there’s nothing for the word causes. There was a link for the Spanish..a book from the Georgia whatever it was about the causes of the Spanish Influenza and you click on the link and a different page comes up but the textbook, it says excerpts from this book but that’s not what we have in front of us. (So the textbook isn’t there?) Right. It said so. It said there would be. Now if we go to Alt Left Arrow. <Back to previous page>

 

And go to the top of page and hit V for the next visited link. <Visited links> See, it doesn’t bring you to the link we clicked on for the text. <Visited links> I have no idea what that graphic is. There’s the link for Spanish Influenza. Let’s hit Shift F10 just to see. <Open browser menu. Arrows down. Escape. Arrows down to results. Enters result link>

 

<JAWS Find. Types ‘causes’. Enter. No results> [chime] <Escape> (Time’s up.)

 

 

Task 1 ends at 02:21:33

 

2.4. Task 1 post-interview begins at 02:22:20

(I know you used the search approaches.)

 

(3 challenges?) Again, I think the first thing is that to figure out a website that does so much is challenging because it’s a needle in a haystack problem. Second, it should have a smarter search engine to accommodate my spelling. (You want a spelling check?) Yeah, or like Google does it somehow. They don’t have a spell check but they go, did you mean? And, as I say, the confusion about accounts, because the help thing talked about accounts, when you get to some of the libraries it asks you for a username and password. Because basically what this website is doing is linking you to other digital libraries, it looks like. And we got to the download a text file and it didn’t download. But I didn’t look on the desktop to see if we have a shortcut to download either.

 

(You used the help page. Was it helpful to you?) Yeah, I’m no dummy, I’ll learn as I go. If the help was helpful before I’ll try it again. Like a friend of mine says, he’s a computer tech, he says, how do I fix things? Well, whenever I fix something I mark it down and then the next computer that comes in with similar symptoms I try the things I tried that worked first.

 

Task 1 post-interview ends at 02:24:17

 

2.5. Task 2 begins at 02:25:32

<In edit box types ‘”women aviator racers”’. Tab. Space to enter search button>

 

<No results> Searching for female aviator racers. And then we go look for results. <JAWS Find. Types ‘results’. Enter. Reads message> Well, find. Alt Left Arrow. <Back to previous page>

 

I think my spelling is ok on that. I think I’ll try it without the quotes and see what happens. <Tabs. Shift Tabs to edit box> [beep] You could search women to female. <Types female aviator racers’. Tab. Space to enter search button>

 

And see how it works without the quotes. <Tabs down towards results> What is save? <Arrows down right column of page. JAWS Find. Types ‘results’. Enter> Look for results. Ah. (Can you tell me your perception of this page?) It added stuff to my search. I thought I just edited. One result, what the hell is that? <Back to homepage>

 

There’s nothing wrong with that search. It’s just the way it was spoken was strange. <Tabs. Forward. Tabs but no reaction> Go to results again. And why is nothing there? Nothing’s on the screen. Nothing’s tabbing, nothing’s entering. So we’re going to hit F5 to refresh the screen. <F5. Does not refresh> And find that that does nothing. <Alt Left Arrow but stays on page> Why did we lose the page? We lost the page. <Tabs to combo boxes above results> Now we found the page. It has lost focus. And we closed a couple pages with Alt F4. We found the page again. <JAWS Find. Types ‘results’. Enter> [chime] <Reads first result> Without clicking on one result somehow we found this open page. (What do you think?) I don’t know how we got here but I’m glad we got here. I think Insert…I pressed Insert T to get the JAWS to read me the title page. <Insert T> And that’s a sample. <Arrows down to bottom> I’m looking with… it’s…there’s a bunch of text. <Headings> I’m navigating by headings just because I want to skip over the text because it asked me to find how many, not just one really good one. <Enter> It said refined search. I wonder what that means. <Headings to bottom. Complimentary information> Good. I like compliments. <Headings up. Enters More to expand> More.

 

<Headings> We got to the same thing. That’s not useful. (Can you tell me what you’re experiencing here?) I’m trying to find, it said refine and then it lists the same thing we found, and then it said more and it said the same thing we found because there is not more because the search said there’d only be one. You never know what you can trust. <Tabs> We try to go back to the top to get to our edit box. <Tabs on blank page> See when you tab and go back you should get to the same edit box. It doesn’t go. Because you should be able to go, ‘here’s your search.’ <Shift tabs up blank page> There’s female aviator racers. Because it doesn’t know to be in forms mode if you try to type there. It won’t work. See? (Can I just interject one second. We were having a hard time seeing something.) <Interviewer closes window that was obscuring page. Tabs> (Can you tell me what you’re trying to do?) I’m trying to get back to the edit box and be able to edit. It wants to let me go to it but it doesn’t want to let me edit it because I should be able to tab once to go and that will tell JAWS to turn on forms mode so I can type. But it says go to top navigation which is not what we want because that’ll bring us to the same loop. Well that’s good they have the shortcuts. <Tabs to bottom of page. Wrap to top> [chime] <N. Back to previous page> See, you can’t edit it. <Alt Tab to Word.> (You are out of the webpage.) Yeah, I’m in the document. What I would do is look for the link. (We don’t want to go that route because it would open up a different browser.) <Alt Tab to DL> But see what I’m thinking is what I’m doing is not working. So I go find the link in the document, then I put the link on the clipboard. <Navigated to homepage> So I wanted to give you my thinking there. Because what we were doing was not working but should have worked. The way to get it to work is to find the link in the document, copy the link to the clipboard, or click on the link, and go back to the webpage and make it behave the way it’s supposed to. To see if it would work. Now let’s see where we are. <Tabs. Shift Tabs to enter edit box> [beep] You have to go to that search button and go back for JAWS to understand. There may be a JAWS keystroke to turn on and off forms mode. It’s supposed to turn on automatically when you do that but it doesn’t. <Types ‘female airplane racer’. Tab. Space to enter search button>

 

Now why would we be getting 1 result from 1 contributing institution. (What are you experiencing here?) I don’t understand female air racer with no quotes should get you many results and why are we getting one. <Headings> And all we get is Amelia Earhart, not that we don’t like Amelia Earhart but there’s many many more women than that who are into air racing. <Back to previous page>

 

We must be doing something wrong. Because there’s no quote around that so it’s as broad as a search can be but it’s not working. <Tab. Shift Tab to enter edit box> [beep] Now we’re able to get into it. (You’re going to try another search?) Yeah, because obviously that doesn’t work. <Deletes text. Types ‘women airplane racing’. Tab. Space to enter search button>

 

<JAWS Find. Types ‘results’. Enter> I’m sorry, it’s JAWS. <Arrows down to result report> Now why does it say that word? It takes my word and then puts some other word with it which turns into gibberish which is distracting. Now we got 57 results for women airplane racers. <Arrows down> 20 items per page. <Arrows through combo boxes> Let me think of anything less to search for than relevance. Gee, that makes sense doesn’t it. (1 minute and 30 seconds.) <Arrows down to result. Tabs results. Enters result link>

 

<Page loading> (Can you tell me why you chose that?) Because I don’t have enough time and I want to get something. I want to see if this photo will come up and says anything. And it says waiting for photo, women licensed in Los Angeles, whatever it said, 1927. But I don’t know if java was enabled and we had message before that java had to be enabled for some of these features to work. And I’m assuming.. <Page loads. Arrows down to links below photo> So I’m trying to get to something worth reading. I’m going to guess we have a graphical picture on the screen. (Time is up.) Useful as tits on a bull.

 

Task 2 ends at 02:40:43

 

2.6. Task 2 post-interview begins at 02:40:45

(You tried to search and refine.) The process should be interesting.

 

(Can you tell me the main 3 problems?) The worst difficulties were that the instructions were clear but the searches didn’t give good results. They were almost being too selective and I know I had spelled them right. We tried to make it as broad as we could to get results but for some reason, even though it said all these articles, it didn’t… (2^nd problem?) Getting back to the search dialogue to try a different search, the standard internet Alt Left and Right Arrow commands were not working for some reason. And when we went to the homepage it still was there. We had to resort to closing and reopening the browser which is ridiculous. Why I don’t know. Maybe it was operator error. Operator error is usually the first cause but the operator has to know what the hell to do to know what not to do. That’s called groping through the maze.

 

(You didn’t use any help feature at this time. Any desired features?) It seems if things worked as they should work it would work fine but without being able to quickly edit that search box, without being able to flip forward and backward through the pages with the Alt Left and Right arrows like you’re supposed to, that made it slow, and why the searches didn’t work is because…if you put female aviator racer you should get a lot. We finally had to broaden to search so much to get results. It was just surprising. We got Amelia Earhart but there were a lot of other women in airplane racing and we know they have articles on them. And we broadened it enough to finally get some results. I think we finally got the graphic page to display but I’m not sure obviously.

 

Task 2 post-interview ends at 02:43:34