Research Information System
Hypertext 2004 - Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, Santa Cruz, CA, United States Of America, 9 - 13 August 2004, pp.116-125, (Full Text)
A high quality of free movement, or mobility, is key to the accessibility, design, and usability of many 'common-use' hypermedia resources (Web sites) and key to good mobility is context and preview. This is especially the case when a hypertext anchor is inaccurately described or is described out of context as confusion and disorientation can ensue. Mobility is similarly reduced when the link target of the anchor has no relationship to the expected information present on the hypertext node (Web page). Confident movement with purpose, ease, and accuracy can only be achieved when complete contextual information and an accurate description of the proposed destination (preview) are available. We suggest that sighted people can benefit from additional context and preview information included in hyperlinks and disprove the empirical evidence that suggests these users do not benefit from link descriptions which have this enhanced information. We briefly describe a middleware system to automatically expand context and preview in link descriptions thereby 'fixing' terse links, links out of context, and inaccurate or inadequate preview information. Finally, we conduct a formative evaluation which shows us that a system to expand context and preview would be useful in different ways depending on the type of link.