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 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?

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.

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.

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?

As awareness amongst web designers grows of the need to create accessible web content, there’s a natural frustration that despite the designer’s best efforts, people can still experience accessibility problems. In the WAI model of accessibility, this might be defined as a user agent problem. A lack of conformance by browsers with UAAG means it still seems to be extraordinarily difficult to make basic,  effective and persistent changes to web page display (for example changing text size, colour schemes) or interaction style (efficient keyboard shortcuts). Following UAAG, especially Guideline 11 and Guideline 12,  would – the theory suggests – make it easy for a user to make the necessary adjustments to meet their accessibility requirements.

The short term, but unsatisfactory, workaround to this problem, has been for web sites to provide accessibility aids as part of their content – features like text resizing widgets and alternative style sheets. Embedding accessibility features in web content has obvious and significant shortcomings – they can only every apply to one web site; so a user can’t rely on them being available across all the sites they want or need to visit.

This ‘give a man a fish or teach a man to fish?’ conundrum has been a focus of attention for many accessibility and standards advocates. In terms of raising awareness, efforts have been made to make it easier to apply accessibility changes through browser widgets (e.g. Firefox text size extension), scripts for accessibility (e.g. AccessMonkey), or user-definable access keys. There are web sites such as the BBC’s MyWeb MyWay, and video tutorials on how to make basic accessibility changes; there’s an ongoing debate on whether a site’s accessibility page is the best place to provide helpful accessibility information.

However, the paradox with all these efforts is that the people who are most likely to be affected are those who are also highly unlikely to find these solutions independently. Without assistance, these valuable tools may remain undiscovered by the people who need them most.

What’s important to realise is that this issue concerns not those with significant impairments that might require, for example, a full blown screen reader, and where an accessibility problem – and solution – is pretty easy to define.

Instead, the people who are most likely to be affected by an inability to make accessibility changes are people with relatively minor, but multiple impairments, which may fluctuate short-term but gradually decline long-term. This includes many older web users, experiencing age related capability decline – and what makes the problem difficult to solve is that the gradual nature of change, allied to an unfamiliarity with the nature of the Web, these users might be unaware they have accessibility requirements.

We’re used to assuming that in accessible design, the user at least knows they have accessibility needs, but what happens when they don’t?

There’s been a lot of work focusing on defining and storing user needs, and using them making adaptations to resources based on these accessibility needs, for example the Supple project. User profiling for accessibility is now standardised, in an e-learning context, in ISO 24751. The WAI-AGE project  is investigating the overlap and differences between ageing and web accessibility; and browser manufacturers like Opera do now seem to appreciate how difficult ‘simple’ accessibility tasks can be for many users.

This is all important work; but beyond technical problems we need to look at how people develop skills in IT use, in how they learn web browsing techniques – and what role, if any, accessibility plays. And we need to understand better how we can discover that a person’s visual, cognitive or mobility capabilities have declined to such a point that applying an accessibility solution (or changing an existing one) would help to sustain independent access.

Tracking a user’s capability changes, keeping this information as accurate and up to date as possible, and using it to make helpful changes – all in an ethical way – is something we plan to tackle in the SUS-IT project over the next three years. I’m really looking forward to working with a team drawn from sociology, psychology, information science as well as computing science to tackle this problem in a more holistic way.

And maybe at the end of it all, we can have a situation where, to use one of my favourite analogies, awareness of the text resizing functions of a web browser is as widespread as that of another accessibility aid – the TV volume control.