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.

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!

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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.

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.