To Infinity and Beyond! Accessibility is the Future for Kids' Search Engines
This vision paper highlights a gap in making search engines accessible for children with varying abilities, which is incremental as it builds on prior work but calls for a new direction.
The paper identifies that existing research on children's search engines treats children as a uniform group, overlooking individual differences in capabilities, and argues for a shift in focus toward accessibility to better serve diverse needs.
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.