Update 18 March 2013: Paper now available. First look at our recently accepted Hypertext 2013 paper! Little is known about the navigation tactics employed by screen reader users when they face problematic situations on the Web. Understanding how these tactics are operationalised and knowing the situations that bring about such tactics paves the way towards modeling navigation behaviour…. Modeling the navigation of users is of utmost importance as it allows not only to predict interactive behaviour, but also to assess the appropriateness of the content in a link, the information architecture of a site and the design of a web page.

The World Wide Web (Web) is a crucial resource for the employment, social networking, and entertainment of visually disabled1 users. However, Web pages are designed for visual interaction, and badly built pages, or those transformed into alternative forms (e.g, audio) by assistive technologies, loose the richness of the visual presentation and structural formatting, thereby becoming inaccessible. Our previous studies suggest that visually disabled users encounter two types of problem: those which are expected and can be adapted to, and those which are difficult and stressful, and can only be handled by coping.