The format of the session was that each panellist was provided with a few minutes to present a position statement on accessibility in today’s practice, and this was followed by questions and discussion. In the short time available to them, my fellow panelists each took a specific angle on accessibility:

• Liam McGee (Communis) argued that usability is ‘accessibility for sissies’, and illustrated how he viewed accessibility as a term that covered many objectives of usability and search-engine optimisation.
• Amy Chen (Senior Usability Secialist at Oracle) described how a large technology vendor can adopt accessibility as part of the design, development and implementation of their technology products.
• Rolf Molich (DialogDesign). As a highly respected and highly influential figure in the usability and HCI field, Rolf took on the mantle of devil’s advocate, arguing that the message of accessibility advocates can sometimes be obfuscated, disguising general good practice in usable and user-centred design as complexly-worded accessibility guidelines.

The role of the accessibility specialist in the usability profession

I decided to focus on what I saw, based on my experience over the last 10 years, were the key roles that an accessibility specialist should perform – whether as a member of a web/software development team, or as an advisor to a large organisation procuring and implementing technology to help it perform its day-to-day activities. These were:

1. Technical advisor – someone who understands the principles behind and implementation techniques of accessibility guidelines, and how to evaluate whether they have been successfully met. Someone who is up to speed on the accessibility benefits and shortcomings of relevant programming languages and digital information formats, whether established or emerging.
2. Motivator – someone who generates empathy for the objectives of accessible design, by encouraging others to appreciate the diversity of ways in which people access and use technology, and the impact accessibility (or lack of) can have on them. Someone who shows that accessibility is something that can inspire innovation and spark creativity, rather than constraining what can be done to the mundane and unexciting. (at this point I had to yet again plug Graham Pullin’s excellent book Design meets Disability )
3. Translator – someone who can effectively present accessibility requirements in their appropriate context – from legislative requirements to practical, pragmatic design requirements. Someone who can ensure that accessibility requirements expressed in an invitation to tender or internal policy are achievable, unambiguous and, if met, genuinely lead to more inclusive technology. Organisations who express accessibility requirements in a coherent and appropriate way are more likely to encourage technogy suppliers to meet those needs. I recounted here examples of where I’ve seen poorly expressed accessibility requirements in a technology specification that could not feasibly be met let alone tested.
4. Gerontechnologist – perhaps my most left-field suggestion, I think accessibility specialists should recognise the particular benefits of involving older people in user centred design, for the added-value that they are likely to provide as participants in requirements gathering activities, and evaluators throughout the design lifecycle. Arguably accessibility guidelines focus on the more extreme end of impairment, at the expense of those with less severe, but multiple, impairments. Evaluating with disabled people is important, and rewarding, but recruitment and scheduling can sometimes be difficult. So the unpredictability of the presence of any age-related sensory, dexterity or cognitive impairments make recruitment of older participants for participatory design and usability testing a particularly attractive option, particularly if resources are tight (see Henny Swan’s comments on the value of testing a web browser with older people).

I offered these definitions as a way of helping people decide whether an accessibility specialist was indeed a specialist, or whether this was a role a usability professional could or should take on.

Discussion

The focus of the discussion with the audience was, from my perspective, largely focused on the challenge of selling accessibility, a topic that is always near the top of the discussion charts and which has received much attention in recent blog posts from Gary Barber and Vlad Alexander.

It’s hard to argue against the objective of accessibility, but in a financially driven context, we’re all too aware that accessibility can sometimes be perceived as a luxury, as a lot of effort for a small group of people. Several members of the audience gave examples of how they have found it difficult to persuade others of the value of investing in accessibility considerations.

Of course, one way to counter that argument is to downplay accessibility as a separate objective – most of good practice in accessibility is general good practice in user-centred design; the SEO overlap is also a powerful argument. That’s more difficult to sell when there is obvious additional work to do, like synchronised captioning.

We can also argue that for every group of disabled people who benefit from a particular accessibility intervention, there is another group of ‘situationally disabled’ people who will also benefit at a particular time and place. But how do we provide hard figures for the number of unexpected beneficiaries of accessibility interventions? And isn’t it an awkward dilemma for an accessibility advocate to be faced with: providing hard statistics that help to calculate cost-benefit of an accessibility requirement when that effort may actually lead someone to justify exclusion?

The most powerful tool seems to be more examples of how accessibility is done well, and in particular how it can spark or encourage innovation. There are plenty examples out there of where this has happened, and it was great to hear that WAI is collecting such examples for an addition to their suite of resources arguing for accessibility. We need to be able to show sceptics examples of where innovation in accessible web design can genuinely lead to benefits for end-user and provider, because if we can’t, it makes advocating inclusive design that much more difficult.

What does all this mean for the usability profession? Do we need accessibility specialists, or is this knowledge and skills that all usability professionals who acknowledge human diversity should expect to have? What do you think?

Here are my thoughts.

Why tags?

A tag is a useful piece of metadata – i.e. a description of some content. Tagging allows us to refind the content, and allows others to find it more easily. Tagging also allows us to find other related content. Aggregation works in many ways – I can describe a resource using more than one tag, I can describe lots of related resources using the same tag. And so can others people.

Tags can be abbreviations, and therefore provide meaningful information and at the same time saving space when there isn’t much available (like in a tweet). I think that the particular restrictions provided by Twitter, and the growing use of hashtags, have brought the issues of a suitable abbreviated accessibility tag to the fore (hence why in this post I use the Twitter hashtag notation when I quote a tag).

A tag for accessibility

There are lots of problems with using ‘accessibility’ as a tag, as a single word description of content.

• It’s a long word – 13 characters, almost 10% of a tweet.
• It’s hard to spell correctly (google for ‘accessability’ or ‘accesibility’ or ‘acessiblity’ to see what I mean’).
• The term accessibility means lots of things to lots of people. I use it to mean “something related to disabled people and the web or other ICT“. Others might use it to describe what I would call ‘availability’ or ‘affordability’.

So when we need to tag something as being related to accessibility, and space is tight, it would be good to have a short tag that we can all agree on to represent accessibility as “something to do with disabled people and the web or ICT“.

‘a11y’ versus other options

#a11y has been used as a tag to mean accessibility for a while. It has benefits:

• It’s short.
• It follows an ICT-oriented convention of shortening long words by using a format AnnB where A is the first letter of the word, B is the last letter of the word, and nn is the number of letters between the first and last letter. So we have a11y for accessibility, i18n for internationalisation, and l10n for localisation.
• It’s used by lots of people in the accessibility community, so a search for ‘a11y’ finds useful and relevant content.

It also has shortcomings:

• It uses a rather geeky convention, so lots of people don’t know what it means.
• It’s awkward to type (for example on an iPhone, switching between alphabetical and numerical key screens)
• It’s easy to misspell, mistaking the ’11′ for ‘ll’. I’ve tagged more than one tweet as ‘ally’ (as in Sheedy or McCoist)…
• It may not sound meaningful when spoken by a screen reader.

So some alternatives have been proposed:

• #access – in comparison to #a11y, it’s longer, and only marginally more recognisable as relating to the concept of accessibility we want to define.
• #axs or #AxS – this has been proposed recently as an alternative, and is shorter than #a11y, and less prone to mis-spelling (although are we supposed to use the capital letters or not? It shouldn’t matter, but may confuse some people) or mis-pronunciation. But I’d argue it is no more recognisable as representing ‘accessibility’ to a newcomer, and less recognisable for those who already use #a11y.
• #ax - this could represent ‘accessible experience’ in the same way that ‘ux’ is reasonably well recognised as ‘user experience’. But I’d argue it’s almost too short to be useful, and (stating the obvious to US readers), it’s already a word – an implement for cutting down trees.

And, for me the biggest problem – none of the above are in widespread use right now. So if we were to adopt one as the new tag for accessibility, it would then make it that mcuh more awkward to find useful existing content already tagged with #a11y?  None of the above options have compelling advantages over #a11y.

The question of whether a tag should be understandable and recognisable to people is interesting, as I’d argue that when we tag in Twitter, the primary purpose of the tag is to be machine readable, not human-understandable. A hashtag in Twitter is useful because a Twitter client can automatically do useful things with it:

• a Twitter feed can be set up to retrieve all tweets with a particular hashtag;
• A hashtag could be displayed as a hyperlink to the results of a search query for all tweets with the hashtag.

Ah, you say, but how would you know to use #a11y in your searches? My answer is that I learnt about the term by reading tweets from people I follow who talk about accessibility, and who used #a11y to tag their tweets. Think about how you build up a subject-specific network in Twitter. You start by following people you know provide interesting tweets on that subject. Then you follow people they retweet, or mention. Then, you might start to search for tweets on a specific subject, by which time you should have got a sense of which tags are used by your network.

And let’s not forget about hashtag definition sites like ‘what the hashtag‘, which do provide a way to store definitions of tags.

Summary

So, in my opinion:

1. Longer, descriptive tags are best when space is not constrained, and certainly more human-friendly.
2. If space is constrained, #a11y is currently the best (or least worst) option for an abbreviated tag for accessibility.
3. Let’s not make already-tagged content harder to find by trying to find and promote a ‘better’ accessibility tag.
4. But it would be much, much better, for Twitter at least, if we could tag tweets outside the 140 character limit, as Jared Smith suggested. Tags, after all, are metadata, and not content.

Firstly, apologies to everyone who received one of these messages and who was inconvenienced by it.

This is a known scam, and there are recognised steps to take if it happens to you. But it made me realise how awkward it is to clear up the mess an incident like this causes, and the impact of the breach of trust that inevitably occurs when people think that I am sending them malicious or junk messages:

• It’s embarrassing for me, as people are at best annoyed with me because a stupid message was sent from my Twitter account, and at worst have their security details compromised because they trusted what I ‘apparently’ sent them.
• It may affect my reputation, and lead to people unfollowing me, or otherwise unengaging with me because they don’t trust me any more.
• It wastes the time of people who are decent enough to alert me, either by direct message, twitter post or email, to say that they believe I sent a dodgy message. 20 people contacted me to tell me about today’s problem, and I am grateful to each of you for taking the time to do so.

I sent an apologetic tweet as soon as I realised what happened (I thought it better not to use DM to apologise!). But people continued to respond after that. I apologised again 7 hours later to catch those who hadn’t seen the first tweet.

So apologising effectively is really difficult! Twitter is a global community covering all time zones, so people might miss my apology tweet because they were asleep, or away from their PC, or just because it was lost in the crowd. Yet the personal nature of a DM is much more likely to compel someone to act on it (firstly to discover it’s spam, and secondly tell me so).

So what’s the most efficient way of telling everyone “I’ve been hacked. I’m sorry. Please ignore my recent DM”? Should I temprarily change my Twitter profile’s description (which people might not notice)? Or send regular apology tweets (potentially annoying followers who already know)? Or should Twitter provide some additional way of allowing me to alert everyone with information of this nature?

This is of course likely to be a problem for any social networking/communication system that has exploitable security flaws – how we go about cleaning up the damage caused by spammers to human relationships. Thoughts are welcome via the comments facility – and thanks to WordPress’ use of Akismet, uninvited spammers are likely to be kept well away from the conversation.

Lesley McIntyre’s work aims to explore how architects can be provided with tools to help them understand better the impact of design features on the navigability of a building to visually impaired people. As with the Web, the attitude of architecture towards accessibility and considering disabled people in design is typically positive, but may be defined – and probably perceived as being constrained – by the need to comply with legislation (in the UK, “DDA compliance” can sound as doom-laden to architects as it does to web designers!) rather than as an opportunity to improve the quality and usability of a design. So there is a need to help architects understand the problems faced by people with sensory, physical and cognitive impairments when navigating the built environment, and how design can help to minimise the chances of these problems occurring.

Part of Lesley’s work involved asking a number of people, each with some form of visual impairment, to navigate through an unfamiliar building, and tracking their journey to identify the location of barriers to progress. She now has a rich collection of data and is working on ways in which this can be presented to architects in a meaningful and helpful way. The aim is to use this data – whether presented through videos, illustrated scenarios, guidelines, manuals, whatever -to help architects avoid making incorrect assumptions about disability, and instead give them a more accurate understanding of the common – and different – problems that face visually impaired people when navigate a building that might be unfamiliar to them (which, let’s not forget, might include sighted people trying to leave a smoke-filled building in an emergency). In turn, the hope is that this knowledge helps them to avoid well-recognised design pitfalls and inspires them to think of new solutions to make the built environment more accessible.

People who create, design and construct objects, whether physical or virtual, benefit from appreciating the diversity of their target audience, which in turn gives  meaning to accessibility-related design guidelines, and thus a sense of the constraints and freedom that such design guidelines offer. As Ann McMeekin (@pixeldiva) and Graham Pullin have both recently and brilliantly demonstrated, designing for disability can lead to great design rather than compromised design.

I’m looking forward to exploring how web accessibility can learn from (and contribute to) Lesley’s work.

In the early days of web accessibility, post WCAG 1.0 release, published surveys of the accessibility of large numbers of web sites were relatively rare (I’m distinguishing these from reviews of a single site conducted by or on behalf of the development team, with the specific aim of identifying and repairing barriers present). So whenever a new survey emerged, it usually provided informative data on levels of conformance against WCAG 1.0, which took time achieve any significant impact on the web design industry. The data allowed us to see how particular sectors were faring, and which checkpoints were most frequently not met.

The publicity surrounding a published accessibility survey that presented data showing how poorly sites were dealing with WCAG conformance could also be claimed to raise awareness of web accessibility in general, and more specifically shame the organisations in question into doing something about the barriers present on their site. The former effect probably did take place, although I’d like to see concrete evidence that surveys actually have a positive effect on the organisations whose sites were reviewed.

(Indeed, there have been concerns that surveys may have a negative impact on ‘usable accessibility.’ If the methodology used focuses excessively on a technical measure of accessibility that becomes a highly public ‘official’ ranking of each site’s performance – with rewards for finishing high up a ranking, there would be understandable pressures for site developers to design to satisfy the surveyors and not disabled people.)

Many published surveys have had severe limitations in methodology and scope – frequently conducted using automated tools only, using a subset of WCAG, and often of the Home page only; and very, very rarely have researchers extended their survey to contact each site’s organisation for follow-up data (a notable exception was a study by Ronald Milliman in 2002). Several published surveys have appeared as academic papers in a wide variety of journals (not just computing/HCI). As the topic was initally relatively uncovered in academic literature, an investigation into the accessibility of web sites in a particular sector – be it higher education, government, e-commerce, tourism, or whatever – made for an attractive publication topic. I should know, I wrote a couple! But at least in the early days we had some data to help say ‘ hey, we all need to do a bit better here’.

Over time, we’ve had some very high impact surveys, such as the UK DRC Formal Investigation into web accessibility, published in 2004, and which combined automated testing with manual inspections; evaluations with disabled people and interviews with web developers. Just recently, at the Accessing Higher Ground 2009 conference, Terrill Thompson presented data from a longitudinal study that compared progress towards accessible content between organisations who had received technical support and those who hadn’t.

Additionally, publications have presented accessibility survey data as part of other valuable research activity, for example when testing new methodologies and tools for large scale accessibility evaluation (important in the real world for regulatory bodies as well as organisations with many web pages), and testing how effective particular evaluation methodologies could be in minimising false positives and false negatives (check the proceedings of W4A for papers by researchers such as Markel Vigo, Giorgio Brajnik and Bambang Parmanto).

Putting aside limitations of scope and evaluation methodology, surveys have not been so good at focusing on content providers and the content provision circumstances. This is to some extent understandable, as it’s easier to run an automated tool across multiple sites than identify, contact and gather data from all the content providers for each site.

Some exceptions are mentioned above – to add to these, my thesis focused on the impact of accessibility audits on the recipient organisations, and my research yielded a limited amount of information on how organisations responded. A few surveys have specifically looked perceptions on and attitudes to web accessibility (for example Lazar et al’s 2004 paper on Improving web accessibility: a study of webmaster perceptions and Bloor Research’s 2009 survey), but we still don’t know very much about the organisational reasons as to why accessibility of a particular web site is not as good as it could be.

As time goes by, therefore, the impact of a survey that presents data on web accessibility diminishes, unless it adds something new to our understanding of the problem. In 2009, it’s not enough to simply claim that results are ‘disappointing’, and that web content authors must ‘do better’. WCAG has been here for 10 years, so it’s not as if we have no best practice; and people and resources promoting and supporting web accessibility are easy to find. A failure to acknowledge in a survey report that that this has been a problem for many years does a disservice to everyone who has been advancing the cause of web accessibility (even if it also gives another stark reminder that there’s much work to do).

So if you conduct a survey of web sites and find accessibility barriers, don’t stop at reporting conformance levels. Find out why the barriers exist. Is it a lack of awareness or training amonst the providers of the content you surveyed? Is it a lack of involvement of disabled people in the design process? Is it a lack of resources; of money; a lack of will, or lack of prominence of accessibility in an organisation’s business practice and philosophy? Is it sub-standard authoring tools, content management systems; quality assurance systems? Is there another reason?

And whatever you find out, please share it with us!

From a technical perspective, this is related to electronic survey accessibility, which in turn could easily be seen as a real world instance of accessible web form design plus accessible navigation; and therefore covered by a subset of WCAG 2.0. However, it’s not as straightforward as that.

I’d initially thought e-assessment was a tool mainly used in colleges and universities – my bias being partly due to working in that sector, and also my impression that the tertiary education community seemed to be responsible for much of the research and development into e-assessment, such as that funded in the UK by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). But I’m now aware that there’s a much, much wider scope of use – in schools, by professional standards bodies, organisations assessing employee capabilities, lifelong learning.

Despite this diversity of use, there are common constraints which can affect how accessibility of e-assessment is approached.

Balancing accessibility and fair competency assessment

E-assessment is about objectively measuring whether someone has sufficient knowledge/skill to meet a certain level of attainment. All candidates should have an equal chance of being objectively assessed, and accessibility barriers should not obstruct a disabled candidate from being able to demonstrate their competency. This can lead to problems when trying to figure out for example how to provide appropriate text alternatives for a graphic that forms part of a question, or choosing between drag-and-drop or radio buttons as a question type.

The e-assessment author should know what knowledge and skill is being assessed, so that should be at the forefront when thinking about accessibility. Are someone’s powers of visual interpretation of a photo, diagram or video being assessed? If so, is it reasonable to exclude someone who can’t see by not describing the graphic or providing audio description for a video? Is manual dexterity a critical part of the skill being assessed? If so, is it reasonable is it to exclude someone who has a tremor, or is unable to use their hands by utilising a drag-and-drop style answer selection? These are questions that have to be answered by the assessment author before effective accessibility solutions can be applied.

The problem occurs when the method of assessment requires a capability that isn’t necessary for the skill being assessed. So, in the above example, example keyboard-inaccessible drag and drop questions are rarely justifiable.

Assessment Environment

The assessment environment also presents accessibility challenges. In theory, e-assessment presents many accessibility wins, by supporting flexibility of delivery – alternative formats become easier to generate based on personal preferences – and easing maintenance tasks. In practice, flexibility can be difficult to achieve in a controlled environment. There is the question of the extent to which the interface used to present the e-assessment to candidates is accessible. Can a disabled candidate navigate through the questions, understand each question, and select and input an answer without undue difficulty? This should be assessed, and any issues acted upon, in advance.

But, also, will a candidate who needs a particular assistive technology or accessibility solution be able to use their own computer and AT? Or will they have to become familiar (potentially at short notice) with another AT that has been provided to them at the last minute, may be unfamiliar and might not be exactly suitable for their needs? The latter situation means a disadvantage for the disabled person being assessed. How do you provide the assessment environment – which might  be a special locked down browser – with sufficient accessibility support? Can you justify refusing to allow someone to bring and use their own computer and AT on the grounds of fairness to others taking the assessment?

The inaccessibility of the assessment enviroment was the central focus of the Latif vs PMI court case, where a ruling found in favour of a blind person claiming discrimination by a professional association.

Assessment creation

We’ve been doing some work looking at the extent to which e-assessment software supports accessible assessment authoring using W3C ATAG as a reference. This work highlighted some of the potential issues that an author might unwittingly introduce, through insufficient or obscure accessibility prompting by the authoring tool. These issue can be managed short term by author training and support (general accessible design and the specific issues surrounding the authoring tool they use) and a suitable quality assurance process before assessments are presented to candidates. Longer term, of course, we need improved authoring tools.

But, at a recent event on e-assessment and accessibility held by Becta, I became more aware of the complex chain of organisations involved in the supply and delivery of an electronic assessment. At a university, a lecturer is likely to be responsible for creating and delivering their own assessments; but elsewhere there are organisations which are responsible for managing and validating the assessment process. They, or a third party, might author assessments which are then provided to schools and other organisations to administer to students.

So if the original authors are not aware of accessibility issues, there is a long chain down which a request for accessibility information – or adjustments – must pass; and there is no guarantee the request will get to the end of the chain. More informed procurement processes may help to ensure that organisations ask for, and receive, e-accessibility in an appropriate way. But the short term requires people administering e-assessments to make doubly sure in advance that they are aware of any potential accessibility barriers present, and takes steps to manage their impact.

The extreme circumstances under which e-assessment takes place means that developments like better accessibility profiling of users and assessments will hopefully have a positive impact, but a contextual and pragmatic approach to accessibility is essential. Thankfully there are people on the case helping to raise awareness, including Becta, and also Techdis, with their guidelines for accessible assessments.

The opening keynote by Royal College of Art professor Anthony Dunne focused on the provocative ‘what if?’ design he and his RCA students have been producing. I’d seen some of this work (mouse-powered TVs, anyone?) in Graham Pullin’s Design Meets Disability book (a review of which you can expect here very soon), and this talk, like the book, made me wonder if we could do with some more critical design in web accessibility: let’s try some accessibility solutions that might on first thoughts seem ‘wrong’ but actually have a positive contribution to make.

I also enjoyed William Hudson revisiting his CHI 2009 paper on the ICT profession, user-centred design and the empathisers/systemisers theory of Simon Baren-Cohen and his work with people on the autistic spectrum. We’ll all be familiar with the natural attraction of programming to people with Asperger syndrome, but the results of William’s survey of ICT professionals, with interesting gender differences, remind us that there can be an issue surrounding lack of empathy amongst developers of their end users. So the question is, how far can/should we raise empathy, and what’s the best way of doing so? With data? With ‘eureka experiences’, the kind of which seem to be particularly successful from an accessibility perspective?

Throughout the conference I heard from and talked to people about work in diverse areas: from Pradipta Biswas‘ simulations for inclusive design to a study of anxiety and wiki contribution to an investigation of older people’s attitudes to social networking. My own paper presentation lasted all of 5 minutes, followed by a 30 minute discussion with Tom McEwan and several others on the challenges facing human-centred technology commercialisation (getting people to use/buy your innovation in a human-centred way). This was not the direction I’d anticipated the discussion heading, but actually it was extremely rewarding for me to be forced to consider our work in this way.

The closing keynote from Bill Buxton was extremely entertaining, but with some serious lessons for ICT designers – in particular to be context-aware (socially, culturally, politically) of what they are doing and what has gone before. He mused over the fact that not one of the reports he’s read on the iPhone’s innovative qualities mentions a 1993 mobile phone that used the same type of buttonless touch based interaction . This was an illustration of the long-nose effect of innovation (the opposite of the long tail in retail strategy) – the many years an innovation typically spends ‘under the radar’, being rethought, reworked and refined before suddenly bang! it becomes a commercial success. How can we shorten this lag – give innovation a nose-job(!)?

From an accessibility perspective, listening to the two keynotes made me realise how much more I need and want to know about innovations that may still be under the radar- and also how frustrated I get with accessibility research and design that is horribly context-unaware, that seems ignorant of the efforts that have gone before, and as a result solves the wrong problem, or is no solution at all. This is quite different to critical design for accessibility, where there is a genuine contribution to be made, even if it is to say “ah, no, that doesn’t work right now”.

So at the end of it all, I left Cambridge with a desire to learn more, to look in new places for information and inspiration, but also reassured that the way I think about accessibility and inclusion technology is, I reckon, headed in roughly the right direction!

Read more

HCI 2009 conference web site

BBC article on HCI 2009 – focusing on the Open House demonstration of innovative technology.

That’s why earlier this year I found myself in the longest queue for the ticket machines outside the Museo del Prado in Madrid, because I was curious to know why nobody seemed to be able to make it work (the answer was confusion caused by two user interfaces – one for selecting tickets, one for the credit card reader positioned below).

Yesterday, I had to send someone a fax. I’d sent the same person a fax last week, and made the common mistake of sending the fax to a telephone number instead of using the fax number (there is a peculiar and specific embarrassment of hearing a disembodied voice try to answer the fax machine’s call while you can do nothing about it). I was so determined not to make the same mistake again…but I did.

I can’t blame what I did on the fancy document-management machine we have in the office that supports printing, copying, scanning and faxing. So I looked at the document I was trying to send, on the second page of which was the fax number.

This was the first problem – the destination fax number was on the document I wanted to send, and being too disorganised to write it down somewhere else, I had to quickly mentally note the number, type it into the machine, and put the document back in the slot ready for scanning.

The second problem is the obvious one. Below the fax number was a phone number. Fax numbers are in an identical format to phone numbers (at least here in the UK), and most commonly will start with the same digits as a phone number: (0nnn) nnnnnn. Chances are the area code and first few digits will be identical for an organisation’s phone and fax number, which means without a distinguishing label it’s impossible to tell whether a number is a fax or phone number.

So when the two are placed close to each other on a document – even when clearly labelled as ‘fax’ or ‘phone’, the chances of entering the wrong number are pretty high – and as I just proved, even when the consequences are known. Just like Derren Brown‘s TV ‘experiments’ where people  press a big red button despite (because of?) being told not to and being shown the consequences.

OK, you’re probably wondering what my point is – we must have known about the problem of fax numbers for years, and aren’t faxes yesterday’s technology anyway? But in 2009, here I am, making the error – twice – so what could have stopped me?

The problem was the presence of two pieces of similar data – one important to the task, one irrelevant. The information design on the document was such that the two very similar numbers were physically close to each other. I didn’t need the phone number to send a fax, so it could have been somewhere else in the document, or not there at all (As it happens, there was also an email address beside the phone number, but I would bet very few people accidentally send faxes to an email address).

It’s a simple information design lesson – think carefully about showing information that may hinder successful completion of a task. If it’s not essential, don’t show it, otherwise position it away from where the user’s focus will likely be.

Finding out more about how older people become successful users of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is particularly interesting for me as an accessibility researcher. We know that there are things we can do as designers to compensate for implications of reduced visual, hearing, motor and cognitive capability. And we know that these capabilities decline as part of the aging process.

But how well does our current assumed best practice really support older ICT users? How appropriate are current accessibility guidelines for dealing with the additional social factors – attitudes to ICT, life experiences, relationships – that may impact on how well (if at all) an older person can become an ICT user?

The W3C WAI recognised that we don’t know enough, and currently Andrew Arch is leading the WAI-AGE project looking at the overlaps and gaps between web accessibility for disabled people and web usability for older people.

‘From factors to social actors’

Sergio has spent 3 years working with and observing nearly 400 older people learning to use ICT in a friendlier environment than an academic usability lab. From his ethnographic observations his PhD thesis provides some valuable new insights into this area. The ethnographic nature of the work means the thesis has many stories of user interaction, illustrated by quotes and photos, so is highly accessible as a document in its own right.

His thesis title ‘Human-computer interaction for older people: from factors to social actors’ summarises the key argument that we need to stop thinking about ICT design for older people as addressing a collection of accessibility challenges mixed in with a dose of technophobia, and take advantage of the life experiences older people have. With his permission, I’ve provided a few of the highlights below.

• Older people want independence but not necessarily isolation. So interface design should give people the ability to  perform tasks using ICT without making mistakes or asking for help. But older people may want to do ICT tasks collaboratively – so we shouldn’t assume someone will be on their own when they email, or browse, or whatever.
• Older people don’t want accessibility solutions that exclude. We might assume people with declining vision, for example, want assistive technology – screen magnification or an alternative input device. But if that marks them out as ‘different’ or ‘special’ in comparison to their peers, then they may be more resistant to use the AT, even though it might be helpful. So any accessibility solution that is provided should as far as possible support gradual transformation of the way they interact with technology, not a traumatic (sudden) change. Kevin Carey expresses this argument of transformation over traumatic change as a desirable goal very effectively.
• The primary goal of interface improvements aimed at helping older people should be to reduce cognitive load – to limit the mental challenges in figuring out what to do, where and how. This will help limit (though obviously will not solve) the impact of issues caused by visual or mobility problems.

The thesis also describes some interesting work investigating:

• the usability of data collection methods – older people prefer being asked questions verbally to filling in long paper or electronic questionnaires;
• interface design. Web developers will be interested to read an evaluation of different options for marking required and optional form fields which found that separating these into two distinct sections using <fieldset> and <legend> was significantly more successful than using asterisks for required fields.

I think it’s an excellent contribution to the field of ICT and web accessibility for older people, using what has been up to now a rarely used method in accessibility research –ethnography – to study what is after all socio-technical problem. I’m sure his work will stimulate lots of discussion, and hopefully further investigations.

Read more

Read the thesis summary online; this page also has a downloadable PDF version of the full thesis in Spanish and English (which I’d say is significantly more readable than mine was!).

Because Sergio’s PhD thesis consisted of a collection of publications, the work is also published in a variety of journal and conference papers – some are available to download, others may require access to academic publication libraries. They’re listed on the web page above.

In a previous blog post I touched on some of the problems with academic web accessibility research – in particular the cost barriers to accessing research published in some journals, and the sometimes lengthy time-to-publication, which can reduce the impact of late-breaking work in a fast moving area like web accessibility.

Copyright reasons prevent me from replicating the work published in the journal. So instead I’ve provided a brief overview of each of the papers that appear, with a link to the page where you can access a copy of the full paper. The authors are also bound by copyright agreements, but I’m sure each would be happy to answer further questions about their work.

The subjects range from from accessibility evaluation and measurement, to supporting accessibility of Web 2.0 applications to investigating the accessibility benefits of semantic markup to effective policies for using the Web to its full potential in enabling access to disabled people to online information and experiences.

From Web accessibility to Web adaptability; Brian Kelly, Liddy Nevile, Sotiris Fanou, Ruth Ellison, Lisa Herrod and David Sloan.

A review of web accessibility from an organisational and policymaker’s perspective. This paper focuses on ways to strike a balance between a policy that limits the chances of unjustified accessibility barriers being introduced in web design while also providing enough flexibility to allow the web in a way that provides the best possible user experience for disabled people by acknowledging and supporting the diversity of and the occasional conflicts between the needs of different groups.

Experimental evaluation of usability and accessibility of heading elements; Takayuki Watanabe.

This paper describes an investigation into the usability and accessibility impact of effective use of HTML heading elements on accessibility, and provides data to support the argument that these features positively impact on usability and accessibility for visually impaired web users.

WAI-ARIA live regions and channels: ReefChat as a case example; Peter Thiessen, Erin Russell.

A case study describing application of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible Rich Internet Application (WAI-ARIA) in creating a chat application usable and accessible by sighted and visually impaired people.

Web accessibility and open source software; Željko Obrenović.

This is a review of the many diverse technologies and solutions that have been developed under an Open Source Software (OSS) approach, and a discussion of how accessible web browsing can be improved through using these technologies in innovative ways.

Tool independence for the web accessibility quantitative metric; Markel Vigo, Giorgio Brajnik, Myriam Arrue and Julio Abascal.

Efficient and accurate web accessibility evaluation on a large scale remains an important objective in the quality assurance of web content, yet the limitations of automated evaluation methods are well known. The authors of this paper propose the Web Accessibility Quantitative Metric as a reliable and independent measure of a Web site’s accessibility.

Editing Wikipedia content by screen reader: Easier interaction with the Accessible Rich Internet Applications suite; Marina Buzzi and Barbara Leporini.

This paper investigates the increasingly important topic of supporting disabled people as producers, and not just consumers, of web content. Wikipedia is the ‘Web 2.0′ example site used, and the authors explain how WAI-ARIA can be used to enhance non-visual usability of editing features of the Wikipedia interface.

Enabling web users and developers to script accessibility with Accessmonkey; Jeffrey Bigham, Jeremy Brudvik, Jessica Leung and Richard Ladner.

This paper focuses on supporting extension of browser functionality for accessibility purposes. AccessMonkey is a scripting framework that can be used to improve accessibility by modifying standard browser – and the authors demonstrate examples of how this can be used to enhance the user experience for disabled people, for example where appropriate assistive technology may not be available.

I hope by providing an introduction to each paper I’ve given you an insight into the diversity of web accessibility research currently taking place, and introduced you to some of the people who are carrying out this important work.