Web Textual Hyperlinks supported with Sign Language Videos

Web users seem to apply a scent following strategy in order to make navigation decisions and find information in a website, (e.g. Card, Pirolli, Van Der Wege, Morrison, Schraedley & Boshart, 2001). This strategy which implies assessing the semantic similarity between searching goals and hyperlink choices is inefficient if the semantic scents are not available to the user as happens, for instance, when they navigate a non native language website. This phenomenon affects especially to users of minority languages like the Sign Language (SL). While the technological advances have made possible the inclusion of the SL in the Web by means of videos, the usability and effectiveness of such innovations has not been tested empirically. We present the result of one study aimed to compare the performance of deaf signers when searching in Websites with textual hyperlinks versus textual hyperlinks supported by SL videos. The result showed that that deaf signer users became less disorientated (measured by the number of page visited per search) and were less dependent of their verbal categorical reasoning abilities in the SL supported than in the textual condition. These results represent an empirical support to the usage of videos linked to textual hyperlinks as an efficient Web navigation mechanism for deaf signer users.