To Infinity and Beyond! Accessibility is the Future for Kids’ Search Engines
Ashlee Milton, Garrett Allen, and Maria Soledad Pera. 2021. “To Infinity and Beyond! Accessibility is the Future for Kids’ Search Engines”. In Proceedings of the IR for Children 2000-2020: Where Are We Now? Workshop co-located with the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.
Abstract
Research in the area of search engines for children remains in its infancy. Seminal works have studied how children use mainstream search engines, as well as how to design and evaluate custom search engines explicitly for children. These works, however, tend to take a one-size-fits-all view, treating children as a unit. Nevertheless, even at the same age, children are known to possess and exhibit different capabilities. These differences affect how children access and use search engines. To better serve children, in this vision paper, we spotlight accessibility and discuss why current research on children and search engines does not, but should, focus on this significant matter.