Books are a medium for communicating information and in recent years have taken the electronic form called e-books. This shift has opened new opportunities for the visually impaired in overcoming their struggles with books in the traditional paper format. Yet, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) claimed that many e-book applications do not meet needs of the visually impaired. Very few studies had investigated this subject matter hence paving the way for this current study to address the above research gap. As a result, equitable access to e-books for the visually impaired is still limited. Hence, there is now a necessity to design usable and accessible e-book interfaces for the visually impaired. To achieve this goal, it is important to identify the e-book requirements of the visually impaired into their e-book applications. An online survey was conducted involving seven visually impaired students at a local Malaysian university. The target participants’ ages are between 21 and 27 years old. The outcomes of this study identified ten requirements for accessible e-book applications for the visually impaired. Among these requirements are features that enable users to zoom, read aloud, and search for book contents. Besides that, screen reader strategy and text-to-speech are also mandatory. Other requirements include clear text and sound, ease of navigation, high contrast, and high brightness. These requirements will involve the field of Human-Computer Interaction design which is applied particularly in the development of usable and accessible mobile e-book applications for the visually impaired.

Abstract. Evaluation for mobile e-book applications are limited and did not address all the important usability measurements. Hence, this study aimed to identify the characteristics that affect user satisfaction on the usability of mobile e-book applications. Five characteristics that have a significant effect on the user satisfaction of mobile e-book applications have been identified namely readability, effectiveness, accessibility, efficiency, and navigation. A usability evaluation was conducted on three mobile e-book applications namely Adobe Acrobat Reader, Ebook Reader, and Amazon Kindle. 30 students from Universiti Utara Malaysia evaluated the mobile e-book applications and their satisfaction was measured using questionnaire. The outcomes discovered that the five characteristics have a significant positive relationship with user satisfaction. This provides insights into the main characteristics that increase user satisfaction.

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The emergence of e-books opens new opportunities for the visually impaired to overcome reading struggling. However, current mobile e-book applications are still not reaching their satisfactory level because of the limitations of mobile devices and lack of understanding of visually impaired needs among mobile application developers. Besides, important factors involve in usability evaluation studies for these applications are still unclear. Therefore, this study aims to develop a usability evaluation model to evaluate an accessible mobile e-book application for the visually impaired. Hence, the study conducted a literature review to identify the usability factors. Secondly, identify the factors that are most frequently used. The authors summarised the identified factors to develop the most important factors relevant to e-book applications for the visually impaired. Thirdly, these factors were then verified by eleven experts. In total, 36 factors were identified from the first phase. The study proposed only five factors: efficiency, effectiveness, satisfaction, learnability, and visual impaired accessibility after applying the summarization and simplifying methods. The results from the expert review shows that all experts agreed with the proposed factors as all the factors get a high average of at least four out of five. These identified factors are vitally important elements to be considered by mobile e-book developers and designers in evaluating whether their mobile e-book applications are usable and accessible to the visually impaired. Consequently, the visually impaired users of mobile e-book application will have the same chance as sighted to benefits from e-book applications.

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