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!).

University of Dundee

My own place of employment, the School of Computing at Dundee University has a long history of research in digital inclusion for disabled and older people . We’re interested in exploring how to improve existing tech to be more inclusive (and teaching others to do the same), and developing new tech to help reduce social exclusion.

As an example, I was recently internal PhD examiner for Suzanne Prior‘s thesis defence, which explored how user centred design techniques can be modified to work with people with severe speech and physical impairments (SSPIs). This work has implications on how AAC devices can be created with greater input from end users; but there are also exciting opportunities to learn more about how web sites and other ICTs can be designed to work better for people with SSPIs.

Teesside University

In the northeast of England, in Middlesbrough, Teesside University’s Accessibility Research Centre is a very active group of e-accessibility researchers, led by Elaine Pearson and Steve Green. They have a focus on accessible learning, investigating topics around the concept of an inclusive virtual learning environment, ranging from learner profiling and adaptive learning environments to aids to teaching web accessibility to enhanced transcript generation tools.

University of York

Down the A19, the University of York HCI Group has a long track record in research focusing on technology, disabled and older people. Accessibility researchers Helen Petrie, Alistair Edwards, Chris Power and colleagues are fellow network members of eAccess+ network, participate in the i2Web project and were previously partners in EU4ALL, a European project focusing on accessible e-learning.

University of Manchester

In the University of Manchester Web Ergonomics lab, Simon Harper and his colleagues work at the intersection of web science and digital inclusion. They’ve carried out several accessibility projects of interest, including transcoding web content to improve non-visual accessibility (SADiE) , accessibility of dynamic web applications (SASWAT), and RIAM, which explored the convergence of mobile web usability and web accessibility; in particular the similarities between data input problems experienced by mobility-impaired desktop PC users and mobile device users on the move.

Loughborough University

Loughborough’s a hotbed of activity in accessibility research, across different subject groups. We’re currently working with colleagues from Computing Science and Information Science on accessibility support for older people as part of the SUS-IT project,.

London

In the London area, there’s:

• The Centre for HCI Design at City University has an active HCI research group with strong interests in accessibility. They also have a consultancy arm, and researcher Makalya Lewis is the driving force behind a11yLDN, the first UK accessibility unconference.
• Middlesex University’s Design for All research team is led by Gill Whitney and Suzette Keith, a colleague on the SUS-IT project. They also set up the UK’s first Masters in Digital Inclusion.
• User-centred design researchers at Brunel University have been looking at the accessibility of online forms to older people, as part of the DIADEM project.

Southampton University

On the south coast, Southampton University’s Learning Societies lab contributes an accessibility focus to Southampton’s wider web science research activity. Led by Mike Wald and EA Draffan, their recent projects have included LexDis, a resource on accessibility, Web 2.0 tools and e-learning, and the JISC Techdis toolbar, a browser extension that can help to improve page accessibility on-the-fly.

Who else?

There’s a lot of research on accessible e-learning taking place in the Open University’s Institute of Educational Technology, and I know several other people who have been active in web accessibility research over the years – people like Neil Witt (@dr_neil) at Plymouth University and Sarah Lewthwaite (@slewth) at Nottingham University. I should also mention Techdis, the UK’s advisory service to the post-16 education sector on disability, technology and education, regularly supports and publishes work aimed at improving accessibility of online educational environments and experiences.

But I know I’ll have missed out a project or group doing interesting accessibility work – so apologies if that’s you! Please add details using the comments feature at the end of this post.

The more people know that there is an active and eager accessibility research community in the UK, the better the conversation will be between those who are doing the research and those who stand to benefit from its outcomes – which bodes well for influencing future web accessibility research directions.

The prospect of escaping cold and wet northern Europe to spend a few days enjoying the early spring sun in southern California, hearing about developments in inclusive design and access technology, while networking with some of the brightest and best people in the field, seems unbelieveably appealing! (Especially if combining the trip with a visit to SXSW, as many are doing).

But for those of us in academia, in the UK, and likely elsewhere outside North America, right now it’s difficult to justify attendance at CSUN on academic grounds – which in turn impacts on whether we can afford to finance a long and expensive trip. Like higher education around the world, research impact drives funding in the UK. For those of us without healthy conference budgets, we need to be able to justify the impact of presenting a paper at a particular international conference, compared to alternatives, or saving our work for presentation in a journal paper.

‘Impact’ is a constantly changing metric; as of now we’re still unclear as to how impact of our research will be measured for the next assessment under the UK Higher Education Research Excellence Framework – the mechanism under which core research funding is allocated to universities in the UK…although given today’s difficult financial climate and the political battleground that is higher education, who knows what will drive future research funding?

What helps us in gauging the impact level of a conference is a rigorous peer-review system for submitted papers. We need to know there is strong competition for paper acceptance, that our work has been scrutinised by our peers and that the work in the papers presented meet the highest standards of academic rigour. I took part in the CSUN review system this year for the first time, and found the review system much less thorough than for other conferences I’ve reviewed for, that  also seek to attract good accessibility and inclusive design research.

Let me be clear that I’m not saying here that the review system means the papers presented at CSUN are likely to be poor – far from it, from the schedule, there look to be some terrific sessions planned. I also want to be clear that I’m not questioning the value of the conference. It’s enduring presence seems to me to be a testament to its ability to attract great people and influential talks.

For researchers, CSUN should be an opportunity to make influential accessibility advocates in industry, government, the non-profit sector (and indeed others in academia) aware of their work, receiving feedback, entering into dialogue that hopefully leads to greater impact of the research being presented. As to impact beyond the accessibility community, that’s not something I can judge from afar, but I assume the conference has great appeal to those new to the field and seeking to learn about accessibility.

The problem is providing evidence of impact of presenting work at CSUN to those who decide how to measure impact and influence of our research. Accessibility and inclusive design research, like much of HCI research, seems to have a tough battle in demonstrating impact within our parent field of computing science where other subjects are dominant (have a look at this list of high impact factor CS journals reported by the Times Higher Education Supplement).

So we have to be careful about our publishing strategy. Budgeting to attend conferences is increasingly tricky, making those with comparatively high publication ratings obviously more attractive. CHI is the daddy, but there are other good places to publish, such as W4A (disclosure – I’m on the steering committee), ASSETS, ICCHP and Interact. With that in mind, CSUN unfortunately has difficulty competing.

I try not to get too driven by impact factor numbers – for me, the real value of a conference is a place to meet peers and friends, present and receive feedback on my work, and find out – and be inspired by – what others are doing. But when finances are driven by someone else’s definition of impact, how do we persuade research funders outside the US of CSUN’s high impact levels on the accessibility community? What could the conference do – if indeed they should do anything? Are you a UK academic who’s been to CSUN (and I know there are several), and found it rewarding?

Or maybe I should just quit moaning and get on with my work?

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.

Update: Sergio comes to Dundee

As of 1st June 2010, Sergio is now working with us in Dundee for two years! He successfully won a grant from the Catalan Government to continue his research focusing on older people, technology use and inclusive design – and we’re delighted that he has chosen to come to join us in the School of Computing. We’re already busy working on a number of collaborative projects, and look forward to sharing our results over the coming months.

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.

One of the discussion topics was “do accessibility and usability advocates lead by example?” Do their web sites exist as inspiring examples of good design? We had a good laugh finding examples of where that answer was a resounding ‘no’ – although disability charity web sites are certainly improving in terms of design quality – and I pointed students to the fantastic Design Eye for a Usability Guy makeover of Jakob Nielsen’s Useit.com web site. The serious point was that if people wish to inspire designers to think about accessibility while maintaining creativity and design appeal, we need to show that it can be done. Not all accessibility advocates are talented designers (I wish I was), but we recognise the importance of getting the message over in an appealing way.

It’s a topic we care a lot about in Dundee; one of my colleagues, Graham Pullin has just written a book Design meets Disability, while by fortunate timing, tonight I became aware of the Enabled by Design web site.

It was ironic, then, that having publicised the schedule for W4A 2o09 today, I noticed a couple of twitter messages deriding the design of the conference web site. You can decide for yourself in what kind of light these comments shed on a web standards advocate; whatever, I’ll not be too proud to take any criticism on behalf of the conference team who developed it. But I did immediately think of Kynn Bartlett’s 2001 article on How to complain to a webmaster about accessibility.

So having used the ‘look at the poor design of some accessibility and usability advocacy sites’ arguments in talking to students, here I am on the end of the very same criticism! It made me wonder – just how critical is the design of a web accessibility conference web site in giving it credibility? How many potential attendees are we (or these Twitter comments) turning away?

I think my answer is that it depends on the target audience. W4A is a research-oriented conference where research is presented – new findings, new theories, new perspectives on an issue, new commercial approaches. Its target market is academics, corporate and public organisations – people who want to learn and share research and development. The attraction is the opportunity to present and publish new work, and to gain – and offer – feedback through talking to one’s peers. If our web site isn’t achingly clever or outstandingly beautiful, are we turning away prospective attendees? Are we stabbing accessibility in the back? I’m not so sure we are.

By contrast, there is a whole other group of web standards and accessibility focused conferences, which are targeted at industry – at web design professionals. The attraction is to come and hear the superstars talk about their new design techniques and web applications, be convinced that accessibility, web standards and a rewarding user experience is something achievable and worthwhile, and go home with knowledge that can be applied straightaway.

Like an academic conference, there is revelation of new information, there is peer-to-peer discussion and sharing, but I think these conferences also have a much bigger role in attracting non-experts – people who are there to learn and be inspired. Thus the conference web site must – I think – work that much harder as a way of attracting people to attend, people who don’t yet know a huge amount about the subject but who may be encouraged by a cool-looking web site much more than a bunch of academics (not that academics have no aesthetic values!).

I’m not writing this to excuse bad design, nor will I take a ‘yeah, but what about THEM?’ approach and write a long post about the usability problems regularly present on HCI and usability conference web sites. Instead, I’ll finish by hoping that W4A 2009 is as successful as last year’s, in bringing together a terrific mix of people to talk about and share new ideas and discoveries in web design – people who want to attend because of what they’ll find out, what they’ll contribute and who they’ll meet, regardless of the appearance of the conference web site.

Just as I hope CSUN, ASSETS, EAFRA, @media, FOWD etc etc all do with equal success.

These initiatives are all evidence of a brighter horizon, the product of efforts by web standards advocates to improve the quality of web design education, and thus the skillset of people entering the web design industry. This follows criticism of the standard of web design education, particularly at university level.

Web standards and accessibility have a very close relationship, so I wanted to talk a little about efforts being made here at Dundee University to promote accessibility and best practice in web design across all areas of education. We do this on a number of fronts, some of which I’m more involved in than others. (Oh – and please read the following as a case study rather than a blatant piece of marketing!)

Web design and accessibility/inclusive design is of course taught as part of the School of Computing’s undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses (Applied Computing, E-commerce Computing, Interactive Media Design, Design Ethnography to name a few), and I give the odd lecture here and there. Accessibility and inclusive design is pervasive from the start and throughout the degree programme, so is taught to all students – even those who don’t continue to Honours level in a Computing-related course.

A couple of examples:

• a Yahoo! sponsored hackday has been a part of the Junior Honours (third year in a Scottish four year Honours degree) web design module on our undergrad programme for a couple of years now. and this year’s winner was a way of supporting searching that may be particularly beneficial for people with physical impairments.
• And given that so much research here is looking at how technology can support disabled and older people, many individual and group student projects have a strong accessibility flavour, and involve interaction with older and disabled people.

We’ve been doing this for many, many years, and we think all this is a unique and very effective way of giving graduates a greater awareness of user diversity and the skills to develop software that takes this into account. I was asked to talk about our approach at an event held last year focusing on best practice in teaching inclusive design across the EU.

Beyond formal taught programmes, web design education takes place on many other levels here at the university, and my role as co-ordinator of the University’s Web Accessibility Support service sees me participating in some of these activities:

• Staff development – reaching out anyone who might be publishing web content: teaching staff, researchers, people working in central services, admin staff. There are courses in web accessibility, in accessible document creation, accessibility in using major content creation applications such as Blackboard, our Virtual Learning Environment. Unfortunately these courses tend to be optional, so awareness-raising and skills-building relies on busy staff finding (or being encouraged to find) time in their schedule to attend.
• PhD and postdoctoral researchers: at Dundee, the Generic Skills team runs a specialist programme specifically supporting in developing career skills alongside their research specialism. We produced and recently taught a introduction to Web design using Web standards, with Ian Lloyd’s Build Your Own Web Site the Right Way as the course text.
• Classes available to the general public. Some are run by the Continuing Education department, and include Web design (I don’t know so much about the content of these courses as my remit is limited to supporting staff). And, separately, there’s often an accessibility flavour to the informal training given by colleagues here in the School of Computing to older people who come to visit our User Centre.

So, as you can see, we’re trying to spread the message to many different audiences, with different backgrounds, different roles, different aspirations, different levels of technical expertise. Inspiration comes from other Higher Education-based or focused organisations and initiatives, such as TechDis in the UK and  WebAIM and Stanford’s Online Accessibility Programme in the US.

It’s an ongoing task – there’s lots more I and others here want to do without the time to do it; but I hope this gives some reassurance that (at least!) some universities are indeed trying to promote and foster understanding of current and future best practice in web design.

I’ll shortly be blogging in more detail about the aims and activities of the University’s Web Accessibility Service, but I’d love to hear more about other approaches to promoting accessibility and web standards to diverse audiences, especially in an educational setting.

In order to do this, I should spend most of my time reading journal papers and attending academic conferences. These publications are peer-reviewed, and should be rigorous and high quality accounts of relevant investigations into how technology can be used to improve the experiences of disabled people. They’re usually the results of major funded research projects, lasting one or more years, and are indeed generally of high quality.

In academia, this is how the quality of our work is measured – the number of publications we achieve, and more importantly, the quality of the place we publish.

The catch is that I can’t afford to travel to every (most!) conference I’d like to (W4A of course an exception), and accessing conference proceedings and journals can cost money too. This shouldn’t be a major problem – we know this is the score, and we have to deal with it. But it makes me think twice if access to a paper isn’t immediate, and I have to pay. (So let’s see more high quality – and free – online journals such as JMIR.)

And given the slow process of peer reviewing, there are occasions where journal publications report on a situation of 18 months ago, which may not reflect current reality, especially in a fast moving (socially as well as technologically) field like the Web. There is also the chance we might be receiving research results by drip-feed – presenting 50% of results in journal X and 50% in journal Y gives researchers two publications, but doubles the efforts required of people who want to learn about the work.

OK, I’m 100% sure these frustrations have been expressed before, and are not original to me. But if I find accessing the research I need can be challenging, what about the people who are making day to day decisions that might affect the accessibility of the resources they produce, and who could benefit from the results of research? It’s why I find, to adapt a phrase from Jakob Nielsen (and Julian Rickards) guerrilla accessibility research so valuable. This is the work typically done in a short period of time, to answer a very specific question, or target a very particular group of web users and published online in a (usually) easy to find place, such as a blog.

So, it’s always wonderful to find and read pieces of work like WebAIM’s screenreader user survey, or Joe Clark’s WordPress ATAG review, or the various screenreader support investigations of TPG’s Gez Lemon and Steve Faulkner, or Alastair Campbell on accessible PDF creation- to name just four examples. This work is current when it is published, and directly focused on questions for which people need answers.

As a bonus, (reflecting the web in general?) research written for the web is generally easier to read than an academic paper, and easy to extract the key points. It will be peer-reviewed, but after publication. If the work is good, people talk about it; if it’s of poor quality, reaction in the blogosphere will be swift. And more and more often, the results of this work are referenced in academic literature, yet I’ll bet is of more direct impact to the people it aims to inform – web designers and developers, assistive technologists, policy makers and anyone else who needs accessibility information quickly.

The paper I wrote on the gulf between the web standards community and researchers working in the field of gerontechnology – supporting access to and use of technology by older people was, perhaps, the first time I really began to look into this problem.

So, where does academic research fit in? Bigger, more complex projects. Personally, I’m not a developer, and I could never call myself a geek – the sort of research I described above can in some cases require a level of technical nosiness I still haven’t acquired yet! I think my best role is figuring out how the impact of research and development such as the examples I gave above can be most effectively conveyed to the harder-to-reach groups: users and web content creators who are not actively looking for (or are likely to happen upon) web accessibility information and innovations. This sort of work does take longer to produce, so is perhaps most suited to an academic research project where a team of people can attack a problem over a decent period of time, and have access to a larger group of people as participant end-users.

Our pledge as academic researchers, though, needs to be to do our best engage with everyone else working towards promoting web accessibility, by making what we discover easier to find. This blog is one attempt to help bridge the gap.

(NB I should say, of course, that academia can contribute technical innovation in the area of web accessibility – of course it can, and has done; many innovations do emerge into the public domain before being published in relevant academic literature. It’s also important not to underplay the work of major tech companies such as IBM, who produce and publish their work in journals and conferences alongside university researchers. In this post I’m addressing the shortcomings of the research publication culture, rather than the people involved in doing research. )