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Introduction
Digital libraries (DLs) have emerged as a new and complex information retrieval (IR) system affording easy access to a variety of digitized resources (Hariri and Norouzi, 2011). Consequently, public libraries, museums and other cultural institutions are increasingly offering digitized collections of images, books, audio-recordings and videos (Matusiak, 2012). DLs have particular significance for blind and visually challenged people, as these could potentially offset the disadvantage of visually encoded information. However, realizing this potential is contingent on DL accessibility. Here, accessibility represents the perceivability, operability and understandability of content and features of the DL interface by listening to the screen-reader (SR) renditions. Blind people predominantly rely on SRs for non-visual interaction with computers and smartphones. This research is concerned with DL accessibility for blind information seekers without DL experience. Universal access is the objective for DLs (ARL, 1995). Approximately 285 million people around the world are blind (WHO, 2010). They comprise an atypical population that interacts with digital resources by listening to information verbalized by the SR. The sight-centred design of digital resources presents challenges in SR-mediated interaction (Babu and Singh, 2013). DLs are highly complex by nature, as content is heterogeneous in format and system dimensions (O'Day and Nardi, 2003). This complexity and sight-centeredness makes IR tasks significantly challenging for blind DL users (Xie et al. , 2015). With increasing digitization, it is imperative for designers and librarians to ensure accessibility of information resources for blind users (Kumar and Sanaman, 2015). Therefore, the question arises: How can a blind-friendly DL environment be provided?
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) (W3C, 2005) addressed Web page interoperability with the SR. WCAG compliance is necessary but not sufficient to create a blind-friendly digital environment (Babu and Singh, 2013). A user-centred knowledge of blind information seekers' needs, abilities and challenges is needed. However, a dearth of research in this area creates a knowledge gap about blind-friendly DL environments. Exploratory research must investigate the design problems that hamper DL accessibility for novice blind users. The motivation for this research is to design more accessible DLs for blind users.
This paper investigates the following research question:
RQ1.What design problems hamper DL accessibility for novice blind users?
Here, novice user refers to blind users who have not accessed DLs...