UC Irvine

Assistive technologies offer numerous benefits for people with visual impairments (PWVI) when reading books in digital formats. Over the past decade, researchers have focused on exploring and enhancing the accessibility of digital book formats for PWVIs; yet, a recent study revealed that PWVI who are parents do not use digital books to read with their children. Scientists do not yet know why this is the case; are digital children’s books inaccessible, or do they fail to meet the needs of co-reading? This thesis presents (1) a content analysis of the accessibility of 14 digital children's books and (2) an interview study with five blind parents about their preferred co-reading technologies with their sighted children. This study reveals that the digital books sampled provided poor accessibility; most notably, the study underscored the absence of any form of image accessibility. Moreover, this research identified that blind parents do not desire to use digital books when reading with their children because, most often, they read before bedtime, and they want to avoid using screens. The key contribution of this work is to identify the factors of blind parents not using digital books with their children and insights into the design of assistive technologies for co-reading, emphasizing a preference for physical formats of children’s books.