Abstract—Web usability is a major concern and quite important for everyone, particularly for people with physical disabilities. It is a dilemma that the wider part of websites is not completely usable for blind people. They find difficulty in navigation in web pages and also face difficulty in using social websites. Over the time different usability techniques and methods have been in practice for the improvement of social websites. The main aim of this paper is to identify different usability problems of social websites from the perspective of blind people. Comparative analysis of YouTube and Facebook applications for blind people has been presented in the paper. Usability of these applications is analyzed on the basis of a survey conducted on the blind people. Results gathered after survey highlight the usability issues of two commonly used websites. It has been clearly found that heuristics are the key attribute of software applications and also a good parameter for measuring usability. This paper addresses the social networks usability problems and their evaluation by choosing Jakob Nielsen’s ten Heuristics. There is an analysis to improve usability of social websites, by evaluation, comparison and questionnaire results.

Index Terms—Heuristic evaluation, mobile government, software quality attributes, web usability.

Anam Ashraf is with the Department of Computer Software Engineering, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST ), H-12, Islamabad, Pakistan (e-mail: anamashraf.mscs19@students.mcs.edu.pk ).
Arif Raza is with the Department of Computer Software Engineering, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST ), H-12, Islamabad, Pakistan (e-mail: arif_raza@mcs.edu.pk).

Cite:Anam Ashraf and Arif Raza, "Heuristic Evaluation of Social Websites: For Blind People," International Journal of Computer and Communication Engineering vol. 2, no. 6, pp. 711-714, 2013.