Navigating a complex website can be challenging for people with limited literacy skills — or even for people with limited time to spend on finding information. When navigating a website, we know that people with limited literacy skills may:
- Get distracted by extra words and elements of a website, like links and icons24, 27
- Navigate in a linear fashion and backtrack frequently26, 28
- Choose the first answer they find, without checking if it’s correct — and have a hard time telling the difference between high- and low-quality information24, 26
- Have trouble recovering from mistakes, like clicking on the wrong link26
When reading, people with limited literacy skills may focus on the center of the screen. Once they shift their focus from the navigation to the center of the screen, they’re unlikely to look back to the navigation to solve a problem or change course if the content isn’t meeting their needs.26, 29
Using a website search function has its own challenges. Typing in a search term requires (somewhat) accurate spelling — some search engines correct misspelled words, but others don’t. Reading and comparing search results to identify the best option is a cognitively challenging task.
As a result, users with limited literacy skills may:
- Spend more time on information search tasks24, 26
- Be more likely to give up if they can’t find information quickly26
- Have a hard time thinking of search terms30
- Tend to only click 1 or 2 links in the search results30
- Add terms to refine a search instead of changing their search strategy31
Recent data suggests that adults with limited literacy skills are using voice-enabled search to overcome some of these challenges.32 This is an example of an accessibility feature designed to serve people with disabilities that has been adopted more widely due to its convenience.
