I arrived at the University of Dundee as a mature student in 1998, to take one year out to get an MSc in Applied Computing, and then go back into industry. Well, it took me rather longer than a year…as in the intervening time I found myself developing for myself a hybrid role of accessibility and inclusive design researcher, teacher and consultant. It’s been (mostly) terrific fun, but it came to an end this week as I start a new job with The Paciello Group. (more…)
May 2, 2013
Time for a change
Posted by David Sloan under Accessibility and Usability | Tags: academia, industry, new job |[4] Comments
March 25, 2013
Open badges and accessibility
Posted by David Sloan under Accessibility and Usability | Tags: accessibility, evaluation, open badge framework, trust, web |Leave a Comment
I recently attended a talk on the Open Badge Framework, by Grainne Hamilton, from the JISC Regional Support Centre Scotland. It got me thinking about the potential Open Badges has a way to allow people to reward sites for a high level of accessibility.
The post that follows is a direct copy of what I originally published on the University of Dundee’s eAccessibility blog. Have a read and let me know what you think.
November 2, 2012
Bland inclusive design is bland
Posted by David Sloan under Accessibility and Usability | Tags: advocacy, inclusive design, innovation |Leave a Comment
Recently, Jared Spool of UIE published a short post asking whether designing for everybody leads to bland results. He argued that in order to avoid acceptable, but anodyne and uninspiring design solutions, design teams need to focus on a given group at the expense of others. The analogy he used was a restaurant that focuses on a particular cuisine and concentrates on achieving excellence in that area rather than trying to cover all tastes. Does that mean he’s suggesting there’s a problem with inclusive design?
April 15, 2012
Building an Accessibility Body of Knowledge
Posted by David Sloan under Accessibility and Usability | Tags: a11ybok, communication, eaccess+, education, research, w4a12 |[4] Comments
This year, we’ve seen a growing prominence of discussions about the idea of developing a resource providing access to trusted information on web and ICT accessibility – an accessibility Body of Knowledge. It would be hard to defend the idea that accessibility knowledge should remain a specialism, held only be a chosen few and made available to others only at great cost, going against the very objective of supporting inclusion that we surely all support. Instead, there’s an obvious attraction for accessibility specialists and those less familiar with accessibility theory and practice to be able to refer to and use a resource that provides authoritative information on accessibility, from development techniques to assistive technology performance and support to legislative requirements to statistics on return-on-investment.
July 29, 2011
A world tour of UK accessibility research groups
Posted by David Sloan under Accessibility and Usability | Tags: academia, accessibility, HCI, older people, research, web |Leave a Comment
In a previous post on guerilla accessibility research I commented on how some of what seems to be the highest-impact innovation in web and ICT accessibility is provided by developers and designers trying out new things, and refining emergent techniques in response to issues that are discovered by their peers or by disabled web users. By contrast, when “universities” and “web standards/inclusive web design” are mentioned in the same sentence, it’s usually to receive criticisms of the poor quality of web design education…
However, in academia, there’s a small, yet bright and enthusiastic community of people tackling various accessibility research challenges (and often injecting inclusive design into the teaching curriculum too). Too often, traditional research dissemination models mean it’s a long time (if ever) before the outcomes of this research make it into the public domain, and academia has work to do to adapt to better use social networking services to share plans and discoveries more quickly and effectively.
So to redress the balance slightly, here’s an overview of some of the groups I know of in the UK who are doing interesting and high-impact web/ICT accessibility research – starting from the north and working south (of course!).
March 14, 2011
CSUNs in the shade
Posted by David Sloan under Accessibility and Usability | Tags: academia, accessibility, conference, csun2011, research |[4] Comments
Excitement is growing amongst people who work in accessibility, as the CSUN 2011 conference in San Diego draws closer. As probably the longest and most well established conference on disability and technology, CSUN attracts a great number of people working in the web and software accessibility and inclusive design area. This year is no exception, judging by the chat on Twitter and the CSUN Tweetup roll-call. But I’ve never been, and I’m unlikely to attend unless my circumstances change. Here’s why.
November 18, 2010
Communicating accessibly
Posted by David Sloan under Accessibility and Usability | Tags: AAC, accessibility, assistive technology, communication, crowd-sourcing, evaluation, fixtheweb, social-media, trust |1 Comment
Yesterday, two unrelated events made me think about accessibility and communication – and in particular the impact of accessibility and usability on a communication system.
