Pat’s Point of View

Despite having attained a much higher level of recognition and awareness, accessibility (and even usability) still faces a major issue; the lack of real user testing. Whether the reasons be economic or simply due to not knowing who to contact, most websites are still not tested at all.

Stefan Haselwimmer writes in E-Access Bulletin about a new service that hopes to solve this problem:

We launched the Usability Exchange in March of this year to overcome many of the problems faced by organisations wishing to conduct disabled-user testing. The Usability Exchange provides a database of both experienced and inexperienced disabled people, as well as an entire usability-testing platform for administering usability tests and collecting results. The time and
expense associated with carrying out usability tests is considerably reduced, making it cost-effective for organisations to conduct regular usability testing for the first time.

For more information read Stefan’s full article (scroll down to topic +11).

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Accessibility, Usability, Web design. If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to leave a comment or follow @patrickkennedy on Twitter.

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About the author

Patrick Kennedy is a user experience strategist and design researcher based in Sydney Australia. He leads research activities that improve the user experience of cross-channel products and services; helping both designers and business decision makers in bringing those products and services to fruition. Read more.