Librarian interview on user needs at a public library (May 22, 2012)

Owned by Tona Monjo
Last updated: Jun 29, 2012 by James YoonVersion comment
2 min read

General data

  • Librarian at a public library in Barcelona
  • Specialized in accessibility for impaired users
  • Works in daily contact with the library's users
  • Users demographic:
    • All kind of users, all ages (they have a kids' section), equal split gender-wise
    • All kind of jobs, some of them retired. The current context of crises increases the number of unemployed users
    • Part of the users are students.
    • The library organizes digital training courses. A high percentage of those attending the courses are seniors. 
    • The library has several computers available (almost always busy) at each flat.  
    • The library has several magnifiers available, both for paper and for screen

Users challenges

  • The library has a lot of senior users, with issues related to: 
    • Eye fatigue
    • Problems with pages with a too complex contents structure or too many elements 
  • Vision disabilities. Frequent users:
    • A blind user (they have installed JAWS in a computer)
    • A user with low-vision (30%) that uses a screen magnifier both for paper and for screen 
  • Motor disabilities
    • They have some users on wheelchair, but besides the physical accessibility issues, no other needs have been detected. 
  • Hearing disabilities
    • Have some users with hearing aid that have never asked for help
  • Cognitive disabilities
    • Related to seniors: lack of focus or difficulties to understand complex pages

Range of preferences

  • Change text size
  • Change screen contrast

Things that would be nice to have

  • Control contrast between text and background
  • Increase the size of links and buttons (some of them don't see the buttons)
  • Ability to increase page elements without loosing the full page view (when users zoom in, the page format increases so they have to scroll both horizontally and vertically to read the page) 
  • Simplify the page (users may complain of web pages with too much information)
  • Help about the contents structure (some users see the page but can not understand it)
  • Save one's own customization profile to use it from any computer in the library
  • When printing a web page, control the size of the elements in the printed document
  • Voice recognition

The teacher of the digital training courses says that would be great if the users could have two versions available for each webpage:

  • The original one
  • A simplified version with a simple design, with a clear contents map and as little information as possible