A recent exchange on Twitter has motivated me to write about the contribution published surveys on web site accessibility make towards understanding and addressing the problems that hold back web accessibility. I’ve read, and continue to read, many, many papers presenting the results of surveys of web sites, and I think we need surveys to look beyond just the data and instead delve more deeply into why the results are as they are. We’ve gone way beyond the point where a paper simply reporting that a study of x web sites from y sector revealed ‘disappointing’ levels of accessibility provides anything more than a minor contribution. Surveys need to look at process not product.
November 15, 2009
Web accessibility surveys – results are frequently disappointing
Posted by David Sloan under Accessibility and Usability | Tags: accessibility, evaluation, research, surveys, web |[5] Comments
July 28, 2009
A fresh look at older people as ICT users
Posted by David Sloan under Accessibility and Usability | Tags: academia, accessibility, ethnography, ICT, older people, research, web |Leave a Comment
Recently I had the pleasure and honour of sitting on the examining panel of a PhD thesis defence by Sergio Sayago, a researcher at the Interactive Technologies Group of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona. I met Sergio at W4A 2009, where he and his supervisor Josep Blat won the Best Paper award for their paper describing an ethnographic study of older people and their use of information and communication technology. Having enjoyed reading that paper and hearing his talks (he gave two at W4A), it was great to be able to announce that he’d successfully defended his PhD thesis.
June 30, 2009
Postcard of a painting
Posted by David Sloan under Accessibility and Usability | Tags: academia, accessibility, research, review, web |1 Comment
Yesterday I received notification of publication of a Web Accessibility Special Issue of the Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology journal, focusing on a selection of the best work presented at recent W4A conferences. I had the pleasure of editing this edition of the journal, and the result is what I think is a very neat cross-section of the web accessibility research and development going on right now.
