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?

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?

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.

But first, some background. W4A was started up by a group of accessibility researchers at the University of Manchester, and was first held in 2004; founders Simon Harper and Yeliz Yesilada still do an enormous amount of work behind the scenes each year.

I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in the last three W4As in various roles. What makes W4A different from other accessibility, web standards and human computer interaction/usability conferences?

I think it’s a combination of a few things. Firstly, it’s a research conference – our presentations are all instances of where boundaries in web accessibility research are being pushed back; so there’s no ‘Accessibility 101′ or ‘Introduction to WCAG 2′. There’s a quality control process – all submissions are peer-reviewed and the best selected for inclusion. W4A is cross-disciplinary, so we receive contributions and attract attendees from academia, from industry and from the public sector, from all over the world. W4A is held alongside WWW, the largest annual web conference in the world, so we always have a great venue in an exciting city (past venues include Beijing, Edinburgh and New York).

These factors mean that we attract an audience that is highly knowledgeable about accessibility, so are ideally placed to critique what they hear, challenging or supporting the speaker as appropriate. And, as a 2 day conference, there are plenty of opportunities for interaction beyond the conference schedule.

The theme this year was Web Accessibility and Older Users; and our two excellent keynotes from Andrew Arch and Mike Paciello, along with several other talks, focused on this subject. But we also heard about a range of topics, from user-generated content accessibility to a new approach to delivering user-agent sensitive web content through innovative server-side technology. Every paper presented at the conference will be available in full from the ACM Digital Library, and presentation slides will also be on the Slidehare W4A09 event.

Rather than go into each paper in depth, here are the key messages I heard from throughout the two days:

• The overlap – and also the differences – between designing for older and for disabled people were clearly identified. We heard that older people do not necessarily want assistive technologies that may improve access to the Web but may also identify them as ‘special’ or ‘different’ or somehow.
• We mustn’t forget just how important ATAG and UAAG are to the web accessibility picture; but we can look to an example (ATutor) of where authoring tool and user agent support (through personalisation) for accessibility have driven development.
• Because of shortcomings in user agents (and user awareness of functionality available in user agents), there is developer frustration at having to do more than just meet WCAG to support accessibility – but the resultant demand for ‘more training for users’ is a very challenging request to meet in the short term.
• Objectively and accurately measuring Web accessibility remains an important strategic and administrative exercise – and hence a research topic.
• User stories allow empathy and understanding to be fostered, and realisations of the often huge gulfs between expert developers and designers, and older people unfamiliar, wary, and sceptical of web technology (but who are still – and this is important – potentially enthusiastic users).

W4A 2010 takes place on 26-27 April next year in Raleigh, North Carolina. What can you expect if you come? Well, a great two days hearing about some exciting work and also meeting with accessibility people from all over the world. If you want to present, you have three options:

1. A Technical paper – a full 8 page submission describing completed research or a new theory relating to web accessibility.
2. A Communication paper – a 4 page submission providing a description of work in progress, or other emerging work that isn’t yet complete enough to form a Technical paper.
3. The Web Accessibility Challenge – a more practical option for people who have developed a new technology or technique for promoting accessibility, and who are prepared to demonstrate it to the audience and judges.

I want to re-emphasise the importance of W4A as a cross disciplinary conference – it’s not just for academics, but for anyone who’s doing any kind of research and development with a web accessibility focus. We want views and opinions from as many different perspectives as possible, because in my view that’s what’s made W4A so successful so far.

The organising team have had some great feedback from delegates this year, and have many ideas for how to make the conference even better than this year – but more suggestions will be gratefully received. We were particularly pleased to see how well using Twitter helped us raise awareness of what was being discussed beyond the conference, and it was fantastic to see so much interest from beyond the walls of the conference room (see the #W4A09 Twitter feed)! My thoughts on making the conference experience as accessible as possible are something I’ll be blogging about separately.

To finish – some other favourite moments from my trip to Spain:

• A wonderful few days in Barcelona, including giving a web accessibility talk at the Universitat de Barcelona, the topic of which will be the subject of another blog post… I discuss in a separate post;
• Visiting the Camp Nou football stadium and immediately becoming a Barça fan;
• Travelling at 300km/h on the AVE train from Barcelona to Madrid. 690km in less than three hours!
• Catching up with old friends, putting faces to names that previously only existed as email or blog authors, and meeting up with new accessibility people at W4A;
• Chatting about football with the jamón-carving waiter at lunch during W4A, who turned out to be a Real Madrid and Liverpool supporting madrileño with a Scouse accent;
• A night of tapas (including black pudding and fried eggs!) and sangria in the buzzing area of La Latina, courtesy of Yod Samuel Martí­n García;
• A fantastic couple of hours in El Prado, being moved not only by some of the world’s most marvellous paintings but also by the sheer enthusiasm of the people there – especially the many groups of young school kids gathered round a classic Goya or Velázquez listening to the story behind the picture.

It was a great week, and I’m already looking forward to W4A 2010. Maybe see you there?

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.