Much Ado about Accessibility: An Exploration of Online Content Accessibility from an Autism-Informed Perspective
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54195/irrj.25297Keywords:
text analysis, autism, web accessibility, search engines, LLMsAbstract
Autism Spectrum Disorder is a neuro-developmental condition that may affect the way a person learns, behaves, and interacts with their environment. Autistic individuals are known to often rely on mainstream information access systems, such as search engines, as their initial point for information discovery. Despite their active online information-seeking practices, autistic individuals struggle to extract information from the resources they encounter, leading to frustration. This raises the question of whether these systems fit the needs and expectations of this population. In this work, we empirically explore how different mainstream information access systems respond to autistic users’ inquiries through the lens of web content accessibility. Specifically, we focus on three text-based perspectives known to impact autistic individuals’ information seeking – structure, readability, and concreteness (tangibility of terminology) of web content. For our analysis, we leverage established accessibility guidelines for autistic individuals to create accessibility profiles for Google, Bing, ChatGPT, and Gemini, providing an overview of various aspects of each system’s responses to common inquiries of autistic individuals. Given the influence of query formulation on produced responses, we also investigate the impact of explicitly informing the system of the user’s condition on the accessibility profile of the considered systems. Our findings reveal potential accessibility limitations of mainstream information access systems when responding to autistic users’ inquiries, more so if their information need is related to the searchers’ condition. Furthermore, including a diagnosis-disclosing phrase in autistic users’ inquiries results in responses that are even less accessible to autistic individuals. Based on our findings, we reflect on autistic users’ access to information and the role of information access technologies in supporting their information-seeking process.
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