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.

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.

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.