Design Guidelines Of Tools For Facilitating Blind People To Independently Format Their Documents

In professional and educational settings, a document's presentation can be as important as its content. Thus, blind people often rely on sighted help for fear of having their documents treated dismissively or misinterpreted as lack of professionalism or education, by sighted readers when the documents do not meet presentation 'standards'. Still, most work on helping blind people with word-processed documents focuses on the content rather than the formatting. Our work aims to enable the development of efficient tools to help blind people independently format their documents. We first sought to understand blind peoples' experiences and issues with document formatting and sighted readers' strategies and expectations regarding well-formatted documents. As a result, we compiled a set of guidelines for such tools and present them here.