Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1145/3744257.3744276

Publication Title

W4A '25: Proceedings of the 22nd International Web for All Conference

Pages

135-146

Conference Name

W4A '25: The 22nd International Web for All Conference, April 28-29, 2025, Sydney, Australia

Abstract

Online reviews have become an integral aspect of consumer decision-making on e-commerce websites, especially in the restaurant industry. Unlike sighted users who can visually skim through the reviews, perusing reviews remains challenging for blind users, who rely on screen reader assistive technology that supports predominantly one-dimensional narration of content via keyboard shortcuts. In an interview study, we uncovered numerous pain points of blind screen reader users with online restaurant reviews, notably, the listening fatigue and frustration after going through only the first few reviews. To address these issues, we developed QuickCue assistive tool that performs aspect-focused sentiment-driven summarization to reorganize the information in the reviews into an alternative, thematically-organized presentation that is conveniently perusable with a screen reader. At its core, QuickCue utilizes a large language model to perform aspect-based joint classification for grouping reviews, followed by focused summarizations within the groups to generate concise representations of reviewers' opinions, which are then presented to the screen reader users via an accessible interface. Evaluation of QuickCue in a user study with 10 participants showed significant improvements in overall usability and task workload compared to the status quo screen reader.

Rights

© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/authors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.

Original Publication Citation

Sunkara, M., Kolgar Nayak, A., Kalari, S., Prakash, Y., Jayarathna, S., Lee, H. N., & Ashok, V. (2025). Adapting online customer reviews for blind users: A case study of restaurant reviews. In B. Norton & T. Kingsmill (Eds.), W4A '25: Proceedings of the 22nd International Web for All Conference (pp. 135-146). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3744257.3744276

ORCID

0000-0002-6970-0203 (Sunkara), 0009-0000-9992-9706 (Nayak), 0009-0003-0927-8252 (Kalari), 0000-0001-8593-327X (Prakash), 0000-0002-4879-7309 (Jayarathna), 0000-0002-4772-1265 (Ashok)

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