Pat’s Point of View

I saw this sign posted on the wall of a medical centre in Sydney. It reads:

[Wheelchair] Restroom Upstairs

That’s a bit bloody rough!

There is a lift nearby, but on first inspection it would appear that should a patient using a wheelchair need to go to the loo, they’d need to somehow conquer the stairs first, and there are a lot of stairs. I think I would probably redesign the sign to say ‘first floor’ rather than ‘upstairs’ and point out that the lift is thataway.

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It’s been a while since I wrote anything about accessibility, probably because I haven’t had much time—too busy with all this consulting and mentoring stuff!

But there have been some recent developments that are worth a mention. For many years there has been fierce debate over the next version of the guidelines (WCAG 2.0) and exactly what they should be. More recently this debate has come to a head in the form of open revolt against the W3C and its plan for WCAG 2.0. A the heart of this was a group of passionate experts (who became known as the ‘WCAG Samurai’) who decided to do something about the situation.

Well the Samurai have just released a draft of their work which they call WCAG 1.0 errata. They are ignoring WCAG 2.0 in whatever state it is currently in and are offering an alternative set of guidelines (a revised version of WCAG 1.0).

As someone who has experience attempting to create accessible websites (and taken a look at WCAG 2.0) I would thoroughly recommend adopting WCAG+Samuari as a practical and effective set of guidelines. All of the politics and squabbling aside, it is quite a relief that some progress is being made towards giving site developers and owners something useful, and definitive, to rely on as they try to do the right thing.

[Thanks to Russ for the tip off.]

See what people are blogging about: WCAG, WCAG 2.0, WCAG Samuari, WCAG errata

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about recruiting users (or I could don a lab coat and call them subjects) for usability testing.

I’ve spent the last year focused on intranets, which when it comes to this, are a breeze. You have a captive audience which can be defined quite well—in terms of job roles and information needs—through a bit of ethnographic research, they are usually close by and are usually quite happy to participate (if it comes to it you can always get their boss to make them do it…<evil laugh>).

Now, working on a website is a whole different ball game. There’s a lot of talk about usability testing—who to test, how many subjects, how to run the sessions—but not a lot on how to find a good source of representative subjects.

In the past, I’ve used two techniques when working on public projects: guerrilla style and external testing. By guerrilla (I just love that word) I mean low-cost, in-house testing where you make use of carefully selected colleagues/friends/family. At the other extreme we almost totally outsourced the recruitment and provision of test labs. Each is a valid technique, if applied appropriately, but both have obvious drawbacks.

Your client might already be in contact with key customers (such as in the case of B2B) and allow you access to their staff, but this is not that common for most projects, and more importantly, are these going to be representative users?

Probably the most popular method of recruitment is to use an external recruiter, normally a market research firm, who can get you subjects. Sometimes they even get you subjects you specify! But this is pretty bloody expensive.

A recent addition to the proverbial toolkit is Usability Exchange which makes it a bit easier by facilitating remote online sessions (specifically for accessibility). But remote testing of this nature has major drawbacks. It’s not surprising that it’s focus is on the more mechanical aspects of accessibility; so much of what you might learn from a one-on-one session is lost with this arrangement.

AGIMO have an interesting bit in their tookit on recruiting participants, although it doesn’t go into specifics. Some of their suggestions are interesting, and the list of pros and cons seems very sensible. Having never used some of these methods (such as cold calling or advertising in the newspaper) I’m not sure how practical they would would be, or how enthusiastic most clients would be to use them.

So it’s looking like the best approach is still to try a combination of methods that are suitable for the specific situation you find yourself in. No silver bullet here…or is there? Do you have a favoured technique for getting hold of usability testing subjects? C’mon let’s hear it.

(And this is just for your usual usability testing, what about cultural probes and other more ‘intrusive’ techniques? How do you find subjects for those?)

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Well, after piking early last night and going home, I had little trouble in getting to the 9 AM start in good shape, but I think others were a bit worse for wear :)

Today’s topics were less interesting than yesterday, but I found Julia Prior’s Technology Designers as Technology Users intriguing, especially considering my technical background. I also enjoyed Christos Katsanos‘ InfoScent Evaluator talk, although I don’t think that will ever be any better than a simple QA tool similar to an web accessibility validation tool. On the subject of accessibility it was good to hear Chris Law’s talk on the usability of accessibility guidelines for designers, except for the fact that he totally excluded web accessibility from his study (he had a reason but I’m not convinced it’s valid).

To wrap things up today, Bill Gaver gave an excellent keynote, which like the opening keynote, was very inspirational and had us all thinking how cool our work could be. But in reality most of us have much less freedom to do work we really want to do, even those with access to cushy research grants :)

His talk was a wonderful mix of interaction design, industrial design, ethnography, film-making and art. And I love the exploratory nature of his work; sniffing around life and seeing what things might be cool to build and play with. I particularly like the drift table, which I would happily place in my living room.

I think the things I have got out of this conference have been that there are lots of different people working in the rough area of HCI, taking many a different approach, and using different talents and skills. We all need to focus on what it is we are good at and want to do, then do it, then appreciate and utilise everyone else’s choice.

I also think we can all learn from one another too. For example, I readily admit that I don’t have a academic background and could certainly learn much theory behind the work I do. On the other hand I think the academy still needs to learn from industry and practitioners operating in commercial environments. One example of this is that a few of the academic presentations I saw lacked real-world credibility, they came across as nothing more than nice big terms for quite simple (but valid) techniques. Trying to pass off some research that involved observation and listening to people as something more than that, by giving it a fancy title, is not building any credibility in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, there are many researchers doing great stuff, but some need to drop the pretence, and stop looking down on practitioners who use the same methods without the name. (They could also learn to prepare more succinct and to-the-point presentations).

See what people are blogging about: ozchi 2006, hci, chisig

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Who said users don’t matter?

On November 14, 2006, in towns and cities around the world, life will be a little easier. That’s when the second annual World Usability Day takes place—a global event promoting the value of usability: designing things that simply work better.

As part of this event, Sydney will host a number of free activities at the State Library of NSW. The focus will be to communicate ways of improving the user experience of products and services.

The program includes:

• The benefits of including usability when designing products and services;
• Microsoft’s usability strategy for Office 2007;
• Mobile phone usability and the opportunities for the future; and
• A demonstration of how vision impaired users experience the web and how it can be improved.
• This event also provides an opportunity to talk to professionals and learn more about developments in usability.

For more information, please visit: www.worldusabilityday.org/event/show/163

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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).

See what people are blogging about: accessibility, usability, web design, website testing

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I’ve been reading a few things lately regarding the issues with WCAG 2.0 (including Joe Clark’s recent article and Lisa Seeman’s email to the WCAG working group) and it occurred to me that perhaps resistance to accessibility is due to people’s fear of disability.

Let’s just assume for the moment that accessibility is just about catering for disabled users. It’s not, but that’s still how most people—particularly large corporations—continue to think of it, and it’s this group of users can be effected by inaccessible services in very significant ways well beyond mere frustration. When confronted with the thought of being disabled in some way, it’s pretty scary, no matter how forward-thinking, how enlightened or how much of a supporter of web-standards you are.

Whether it’s a vision impairment, a learning difficulty or motor control disorder, the thought that you might be in such a situation can be terrifying. It’s important to point out that many people who have disabilities as per medical diagnosis don’t consider themselves disabled, and live perfectly productive and fulfilling lives. My point isn’t that they’re ‘worse off’ or pitiful, rather that most of us would perceive an illness or loss of ability or faculty, as less than desirable. I think this might be more than enough to stop people from ‘getting into the head’ of the audience in order to understand their needs and build something that effectively meet those needs. Perhaps it’s just too scary to think about what it would be like to be in that position.

I’m not excluding myself from this, although I must admit I’d never though of website accessibility in this way before now. Really thinking about what it must be like to live with a mental disability, for instance, and trying to participate in our society, along side those of us fortunate enough to not have any such challenges, is terrifying. Not being able to live my life as I currently do, not being able to do the things I can do, not being as lucky as I am…makes me not want to think about it.

Now of course there are other reasons for disregarding the accessibility movement; particularly economic ("it costs more to make our website accessible") but it could be that we just don’t want to think about it. We ignore it. Maybe this is why we feel a lot better making some sort of effort towards accessibility. If we tweak some code or drop in an alt attribute, we’re doing our part which means we don’t need to think about it any deeper.

But I’d like to think that by going further and creating truly accessible content and services we can make at least one (possibly small) part of some people’s lives easier (and I’m talking about being able to buy your groceries online even though you have can’t use a mouse or keyboard, not ensuring the latest Big Brother gossip is viewable on a mobile phone). Wouldn’t we all appreciate that if we were in ‘their’ position?

See what people are blogging about: WCAG 2.0, accessibility, disability

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A few Friday’s ago (7th April) I attended a mini seminar organised by The Web Standards Group (WSG), on the subject of WCAG 2.0 the next version of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

These guidelines are the bread and butter of accessibility. Version 1 was published in 1998 and so we have all been waiting anxiously in the last few years for a new version that hopefully addresses some of the many issues that practitioners have come across when using the guidelines “in the trenches”.

But sadly we’re still waiting and there have been many stories going around about the disastrous time the W3C is having in trying to deliver WCAG 2.0, and what I heard on Friday is no more promising. It appears that the corporates (who shall not be named) have hijacked the working group and steered it towards creating a set of guidelines that are even more confusing than WCAG 1.0 and even less strict.

Besides being incomprehensible by normal human beings (and thus impossible to implement, test, police) they have been watered down. True, version 1 had it’s faults (including being biased towards visual disabilities) but in an effort to fix this and in conjunction with the whole corporate hijacking, version 2 is much worse.

I think unless we take action and force the W3C to re-think WCAG 2.0, the already frustrating state of affairs in the accessibility field will get rapidly worse and potentially we’ll be left without anything to guide us in developing accessible websites and intranets.

The second speaker of the night was Bruce McGuire, from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HEREOC). Bruce has found a modicum of fame as the plaintiff in the first (and one of very few) legal battles over accessibility, when in 2000 he sued IBM over the badly constructed Sydney Olympics website. It’s almost always the cited case when people try to build an argument for the legal responsibility behind accessibility. Besides being quite an entertaining speaker, Bruce also gave us some good insight into the official view of the Australian government and legal system. He hinted that because of the troubles with WCAG 2.0, HEREOC and other policy making bodies around the world, may end up diverging from the W3C’s guidelines and making their own recommendations on how we should approach accessibility.

Although this will undoubtedly be rather messy, I was glad to hear there are sensible people saying sensible things in our government. Rather than tasking the easy way out, and simply following the whatever the W3C outputs, they may actually put the needs of the community first and try to rectify the situation.

A podcast of the seminar can be found on the WSG website.

See what people are blogging about: accessibility, Web Standards Group, WCAG 2.0

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Someone pointed me to a series of three articles on evaluating website accessibility, by Roger Johansson. They’re an excellent practical guide to accessibility, similar to my own recently published article.

Many people, web developers as well as website owners, are new to website accessibility and find it difficult to evaluate. This three-part article series is intended to make it easier for non-experts to perform a basic accessibility check. I hope it will be helpful enough to make at least a few websites more accessible.

Whilst occasionally being a little heavy handed, his heart is in the right place and I think it’s great to see the upswing in popularity of web standards and accessibility amoung web designers and developers. And Sweden rocks, so he gets extra points in my book.

See what people are blogging about: accessibility, web standards

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I’ve written a new paper on practical accessibility, a follow up from my earlier introduction to accessibility article. Published by Step Two Designs.

There is a great deal of hype on this topic and a lot of discussion too, yet vagueness and confusion persist. Web teams face a considerable amount of political pressure to ’be compliant’, but often don’t know where to start. This can result in aggravation, misdirection of effort and ultimately a failure to make the website any more accessible.

Often what is needed is a pragmatic view based on real experience, to reveal what is really important and what should be tackled first.

This paper provides ten key tips to help improve the accessibility of any website, or intranet. It’s not intended to be an introduction to web accessibility nor is this intended to be an exhaustive manual covering every detail of every accessibility technique. Besides being counter-productive and far from helpful as a starting point, it is just not possible to do this. Best practice changes constantly and one must focus on the underlying approach rather than specific details.

See what people are blogging about: accessibility, website, tips, Step Two

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