Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2026

DOI

10.1145/3786304.3788841

Publication Title

CHIIR '26: Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval

Pages

295-305

Conference Name

CHIIR '26: 2026 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, March 22-26, 2026, Seattle, USA

Abstract

While online shopping platforms provide convenience and autonomy to blind users, their non-visual interactions remain underexplored at a micro-behavioral level. Existing studies have primarily emphasized accessibility and usability challenges but have overlooked how fine-grained, screen reader-driven keystroke-level behaviors reflect users’ cognitive strategies. In this paper, we present the findings of a longitudinal study with 25 blind participants to examine their micro-behavioral patterns, using keyboard activity and screen reader logs on both familiar and unfamiliar e-commerce websites. We complemented this study with semi-structured interviews to contextualize the uncovered micro-behavioral patterns. Our results revealed patterns in how blind users draw upon cognitive maps and well-established shortcut routines developed on familiar websites to streamline navigation on unfamiliar platforms. However, unfamiliar websites, even when structurally accessible, often introduced elevated navigation entropy, increased shortcut failures, and induced more exploratory behavior, as users worked to reconstruct new mental models. Additionally, we also identified a strong preferential structure in keyboard shortcut use, where users maintain a personalized and often chronologically-ranked sequence of keystrokes. Furthermore, most users approached shopping with pre-planned objectives, relying on targeted search queries rather than broad ad-hoc product exploration for securing the ‘best deals’. Based on the study insights, we discuss design considerations for assistive technology developers and e-commerce websites to further improve the online shopping experience for blind users.

Rights

© 2026 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

Prakash, Y., Kolgar Nayak, A., Venkatraman, N., Jayarathna, S., Lee, H.-N., & Ashok, V. (2026). Micro-behavioral analysis of online shopping patterns for blind users. In C. Shah, R. W. White, A. Fourney, C. T. Lopes, & J. Trippas (Eds.), CHIIR '26: Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (pp. 295-305). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3786304.3788841

ORCID

0000-0001-8593-327X (Prakash), 0009-0000-9992-9706 (Nayak), 0009-0008-5428-5052 (Venkatraman), 0000-0002-4879-7309 (Jayarathna), 0000-0002-2183-1722 (Lee), 0000-0002-4772-1265 (Ashok)

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