Proxy Interfaces for Enhancing Non-Visual Web Usability

People with blindness or visual impairments (BVI) face significant barriers when navigating the web, even when digital content is technically accessible. These challenges arise not from a lack of access, but from a mismatch between vision-centric user interfaces and the linear, audio-based interaction paradigms of screen readers. Sighted users rely on spatial layout, grouping, and visual cues to interpret structure quickly, while blind users must explore elements sequentially, often without sufficient context. As a result, they expend greater cognitive effort, become disoriented more easily, and struggle with tasks that are usually trivial for sighted users. Although accessibility initiatives have focused primarily on ensuring access, comparatively little attention has been given to usability. Motivated by this gap, this dissertation introduces intelligent proxy interfaces as a unifying approach to enhance non-visual web usability by transforming visually-encoded information into semantically meaningful, screen reader-friendly representations. Specifically, this thesis presents and evaluates novel proxy-based interface-augmentation techniques, each targeting a different domain of web interaction. First, I address general web navigation through the sTag proxy interface, a browser extension that enables blind users to create personalized Table-of- Contents (TOC) overlays by tagging and revisiting meaningful page segments, thereby reducing repetitive exploration and navigation fatigue. Second, I improve the usability of structured web data for blind users with the intelligent InSupport proxy interface that automatically extracts and reorganizes web items such as product listings and attributes into simplified formats that support efficient non-visual comparisons and natural-language queries. Lastly, I present the Standpoint proxy interface to enhance usability of unstructured web data such as user-generated content in discussion forums. Specifically, the Standpoint proxy interface analyzes and automatically restructures discussion threads into coherent, context-aware non-visual presentations aligned with users’ preferences. My evaluation studies demonstrate that, overall, the presented proxy interfaces significantly reduce cognitive load, improve navigation efficiency, and expand the range of web interactions both accessible and usable to blind users. Together, these contributions demonstrate how proxy-driven transformations can advance the shift from just accessible web content toward genuinely usable non-visual web experiences for BVI individuals.