Coping tactics employed by visually disabled users on the web

Author-Highlights
• We provide 17 coping tactics visually disabled users employ on the Web.
• We frame problematic situations that provoke tactics within the context of coping theory.
• Coping tactics are behavioural markers of cognitive processes that indicate problematic situations.
• Detecting tactics enables alleviating problematic situations and opens new avenues in web evaluation and modelling.

Interaction on the Web is often problematic for visually disabled users. In order to analyse how visually disabled users deal with problematic situations we carried out a secondary analysis of 2 independent datasets containing the interaction of 24 users. As a result, we determine the situations in which coping occurs including uncertainty, reduced mobility, confusion and overload, and identify 17 tactics employed to overcome these situations, being impulsive clicking, exploration tactics and re-doing some of the most noteworthy. These tactics are novel in that they are contextualised and complete: their presence denotes the presence of specific problems. Therefore, these tactics are behavioural markers of cognitive processes that indicate problematic situations. We highlight the importance of these behavioural markers for designers and tools in order to remove the need to cope, evaluate accessibility-in-use and inform navigation models.