Are live search results helpful to low vision or blind users?

By Jeff Wong, 29 September, 2015

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Are live search results helpful to low vision or blind users?

My intuition says yes because then you can avoid typing out the whole search query which can be quite time consuming. However, I realized that there is a time cost for reviewing those results and it might be simpler to finish entering what you were going to enter.

Or does it depend on the content and the quality of the partial results?

Sometimes unfinished words give results that are totally unrelated to what you were looking for.

Options

Comments

By Marconius on Thursday, October 22, 2015 - 10:12

Blind user here. Anytime I have the option to disable live searching, I always disable it. It really gets in the way of hearing voiceover feedback, especially when attempting to type. If I want to really quickly search for something, having to jump through a few extra hoops to ensure that exactly what I want will be searched for rather than having something get automatically filled in or replaced can be quite frustrating.
Being able to toggle live results very quickly with a key command would be useful. Basically, anything that interferes with or attempts to replace what I'm typing is a burden, and it's much faster to just type your query and start navigating down through the search headings than typing a little bit in and trying to go through all of the live results.

By rdfreak on Thursday, October 22, 2015 - 10:12

Whereas, I love it; saves so much time.
So It depends on the person honestly.

By Siobhan on Thursday, October 22, 2015 - 10:12

For those who like it, maybe have it on by default, but make a setting turn off live search results? No idea what you're developing, sounds interesting.