Breaking the News Barrier: Towards Understanding News Consumption Practices among BVI Individuals in India
Peya Mowar, Meghna Gupta, Mohit Jain · 2024 · ASSETS 2024: 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility · doi:10.1145/3663548.3675608
Summary
This study examines digital news consumption practices among blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals in India, a country home to approximately 4.95 million blind and 35 million visually impaired people. Through semi-structured interviews and contextual inquiry with 17 participants (ages 18-67, from urban, semi-urban, and rural areas across India), the researchers observed participants consuming news on their regular devices and then conducted in-depth interviews about motivations, preferences, barriers, and workarounds. Participants accessed news through two primary modalities: text-based (news websites, apps, aggregators via screen readers) and audio-based (television, radio, YouTube, smart speakers). News consumption was deeply motivated by social mobility—eight participants consumed news to participate in social conversations and avoid feelings of social backwardness, while four actively read news to prepare for competitive government exams. Participants from rural India additionally used English news to improve their English proficiency, as English is associated with higher earning potential. Source selection was shaped not primarily by accessibility but by perceived neutrality, coverage breadth, and trust in established brands, with participants sometimes choosing inaccessible platforms because of content quality. The study reveals how news consumption patterns in the BVI community diverge significantly from broader Indian trends, with intentional active seeking of news rather than the passive "news finds me" pattern common among sighted users.
Key findings
Advertisements emerged as the single most significant barrier to accessible news consumption, with participants calling ads their "biggest enemies"—dynamic flash-based ads caused cursor displacement, loss of screen reader focus, and difficulty distinguishing skippable from compulsory ads on video platforms. Participants relied on volunteer-driven accessible e-newspapers from the Braille section of Anna Centenary Library (Braille ACL) in Chennai as a critical stopgap, though these were limited to English and Tamil, infrequent, and sometimes unreliable in delivery timing. Local language news content was frequently presented in non-Unicode fonts that screen readers could not parse, rendering regional language websites useless. E-newspapers from traditional media organizations were often scanned image PDFs inaccessible to screen readers. Participants used OCR applications like Text Freedom and Envision to extract text from inaccessible graphics but found the process slow and error-prone. Several participants had begun using ChatGPT and Alexa for news summaries, though they found AI assistants frequently inaccurate. The glanceability problem was acute—BVI users could not quickly scan visual layouts to identify stories of interest the way sighted users do. Many participants preferred laptops and tablets over smartphones for active news reading, contradicting India's characterization as a mobile-first market. The onus of accessibility fell unfairly on the visually impaired community, with participants expressing isolation and neglect from news agencies.
Relevance
This research makes an important contribution by examining news accessibility in the Global South, where the digital infrastructure, language diversity, and socioeconomic context differ fundamentally from the Western settings that dominate prior work. The finding that BVI users in India actively seek news for social mobility rather than passively encountering it challenges assumptions baked into recommendation-driven news platform design. For practitioners, the paper offers three concrete design recommendations: navigational assistance for advertisements (indicating skippability, providing keyboard shortcuts, opening ads in separate tabs), automated digitization of local language newspapers using multi-modal AI models to convert print to screen-reader-friendly text, and conversational glanceability support using AI agents to explain visual layouts and help users locate content of interest. The study highlights how accessibility barriers create information delays that affect not just convenience but civic participation, social inclusion, and career advancement.
Tags: blindness · visual impairment · news consumption · screen readers · information access · digital media accessibility · Global South · India
Standards referenced: WCAG