Accessibility

The New Media Age Effectiveness Awards promotes the quality of new media usage in the UK, emphasising effectiveness to allow smaller companies to compete on an equal footing with larger ones. Providing a benchmark of excellence for the industry, illustrating the importance of usability and accessibility, in building an effective online presence. Demonstrating the power of interactive media to the wider business world.

Foviance is sponsoring and conducting the usability testing for the shortlisted entries, in the ‘Business’ and the ‘Best use of Web’ categories, with Catriona Campbell, founder of Foviance, judging at the event.

By Lis Shorten

It didn’t occur to me until recently that a blind person would even contemplate using an iPhone. After all, it’s a touchscreen interface that requires interaction between a finger and an onscreen image and lacks any sort of tactile or sensory feedback.

If I turn my phone off, then close my eyes and try to turn it back on, I fail at the first hurdle (slide to unlock). Even though I’ve turned my phone on hundreds, possibly thousands of times, with my eyes closed I never seem to get my thumb in the right place to accurately swipe the slider. Read more…

By Lis Shorten

Have you ever wondered what it might be like to browse a website with a visual impairment? Or wondered how your website is perceived by a person with a vision disorder?

There are many different types of vision disorders that can affect a user’s ability to view web pages and way too many to cover off here. However, to give you an idea, I have simulated how the Foviance website homepage might look to someone with cataracts, macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. These are four of the most common types of vision disorders. Cataracts is the leading cause of blindness worldwide and in the UK, 2 million people are visually impaired with macular degeneration (40%), glaucoma (13%) and diabetic retinopathy (8%) being the three most common causes. Read more…

I’m giving a short talk at eMetrics London next week (18th May). I was absolutely chuffed to be asked by Jim Sterne to take part. He has asked me to provide a ‘real world’ context of what metrics are being used by companies out there.

I remember the first time I attended an eMetrics conference in 2005 and being overawed by the calibre of the people speaking. It was also the first time I came away from a conference with a souvenir bag full of goodies including what looked like a sextant. Read more…

One of the big challenges of providing usability, accessibility and analytics consultancy services to help businesses improve their customer experience, is to ensure that information is digestible and therefore more readily usable and practical.

There is a trend, particularly in the web analytical arena, for some consultancies to simply create more and more metrics for businesses, rather than working on their clarity. Unfortunately, there is also a tendency for many people to suffer from ‘data blindness’ when confronted with rafts of metrics churned out by multiple tools and technologies. Advertising campaign management, web analytics, CRM, and other intelligence tools should enable businesses to interact better with their customers, but for many actually understanding all that information – particularly across wide portfolio websites – proves very frustrating. Read more…

If you are one of the world’s 450 million mobile internet users, you’ll already know that are two primary methods of accessing online content from your mobile phone, smartphone or other wireless device – mobile websites and mobile applications. Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 23/10/09 and is republished here with permission.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks on the conference circuit. WebTrends held their Engage conference in London and last week I was in Washington DC for the Emetrics Marking Optimization Summit . It was good to see WebTrends out and about in the market, showing off some of their latest stuff. They’ve been working hard on their messaging by the looks of it and getting a distinctive market positioning going. The core brand themes they talked about were “Power”, “Elegance” and “Openness”. Read more…

By Lis Shorten

It is quite common on many web pages to find ‘more’, ‘read more’ and ‘continue reading’ links that follow a headline or summary of an article to let users read on. The upside of this is to fit more content on the page, enabling readers to scan the headlines more quickly. Read more…