Accessibility

By Katie Buchanan

Wimbledon might be over for another year, but this year welcomed a few differences. Not only was there a new men’s champion for the first time in five years, there was also a massive improvement in coverage for the working population.

For the first time, tennis fans were able to visit the BBC website and watch free live match streaming of play on a court of their choice from their own desks. The ability to launch a compact pop-out window perfectly catered for the needs of a desk-bound audience needing to work (or at least pretend to work) on other documents whilst keeping an eye on the game. This ability coupled with the option to watch match highlights and previous matches on BBC iPlayer, offered convenience like never before.

The good news for all sports fans is that the growing accessibility of live coverage online is set to continue. Developments in mobile technology and infrastructure will enable more and more users to watch live sport on the move via their mobile phones. Perhaps next Wimbledon, you could watch a nail-biting five-set semi-final between Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal from start to finish without changing your daily habits or missing a single point. You could stream it to your desk at work on the BBC website, and then switch to your mobile on your commute home, before catching the climax on TV. Indeed, with the greatest show on earth, the Beijing Olympics, due to start this month, fans will be eager to be in continual touch with developments as early as possible.

The potential is clear to see. For media organisations, getting content to people wherever they are, regardless of platform, is an attractive proposition. Of course with any new technology it is vital that it is delivered in a way that truly addresses peoples’ needs. In order to drive usage it is necessary to have comprehensive knowledge about the who, what, why, when, where and how of human behaviour:

• Who – refers to the people demanding these applications and those that could be triggered to use them
• What – pertains to particular features or functionality they want
• Why – determines the drivers of use
• When – suggests the most appropriate time for use
• Where – questions the context of use with regard to both physical and social environment
• How – examines the behaviour actually exhibited in using these new offerings.

At Foviance we are proud to be currently working with a number of brands and are employing innovative research methods to help them truly understand how their consumers respond to these new concepts. This is aiding them in their development efforts while providing greater clarity for future strategy.

As modern business channels grow ever more diverse and technologically advanced, usability and accessibility techniques must evolve rapidly to keep pace. Specialist laboratories, industry benchmarking, eye tracking, automated usability tests and competitive analysis are all effective tools available to the modern usability consultant. However, our strong belief in a user-centric design methodology demands more than technical advances alone.

Recently I undertook an intranet development project for a major organisation which relied primarily on in-depth user based research. User based research requires the human touch. We submerge ourselves in the workplace culture and society of our clients in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the behaviour, communications, expectations, opinions and feelings of individuals. This particular project called for the redesign of a sizeable intranet guided by feedback from the end users themselves.

We involved individuals in group discussions and one-to-one conversations in their own workplace so that they felt free to talk about issues close to them in a familiar environment that put them at ease. When people have extreme views, usually about changing a system radically or leaving it exactly the same, it’s important they feel free to open up and not be on guard, which is one advantage of escaping a clinical viewing room or laboratory. It is always very revealing to see how people respond or don’t respond to the promise of change. Recommendations are far better informed if the culture of an organisation is better understood. How do individuals want to upload new information? How would they like to interact with it? What makes them trust information? Questions like these all impact upon intranet development to try and ensure as many different considerations are fulfilled. Internal culture mustn’t restrict design and development across an organisation, but neither should considerations be seen to be imposed from the top.

User based research works most effectively in conjunction with other usability research techniques such as one-to-one card sorting or telephone interviews. Feedback from multiple techniques can then be pulled together to create model personas that can be used to develop site maps and push on with the full design.

In the past an agency might have fulfilled a project like this by presenting a proven generic intranet model to high-level management within the customer organisation, and then consulting only those executives who hold the budget and IT reins. Now we know there is much more value in talking to the secretary that will actually use the new intranet most each day. This ‘bottom-up’ approach provides the right perspective and insight for the job. In the future, if budgets allow for it, we’d like to immerse ourselves even deeper into client culture, shadowing processes over a longer term and in a wider range of working environments to get the most value possible from the human touch.

Our Experience Management Programme helped Haven improve its customer experience and conversion rates through a combination of data analysis, surveys and traditional usability techniques.

Strategic recommendations enabled Haven to transform from a project-by-project approach to one of continual improvements, enabling it to optimise routes to conversion. With information provided on attitude and values profiling, Haven was also able to identify its most valuable customers.

As a result of site performance and traffic analysis, site drop off decreased by 8%. The travel industry website Travolution rated the site 24/25 for usability and 22/25 for accessibility.

By Lis Shorten

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) date from the last century. Back in 1999, the web was a different place. Ajax was a detergent and most thought broadband was gangster slang for the Spice Girls. Eight years on, WCAG has grown old disgracefully, and much of it is obsolete.

While browsers, plug-ins, website design techniques, and assistive technology have all moved on, the guidelines have stood still. Checkpoint 10.5 advises designers to include non-link printable characters between links until user agents can render adjacent links distinctly. Now they can, that’s a waste of time and likely to annoy screen reader users who will have to listen to those characters being read out. Similarly, the reminder to include placeholder characters in edit boxes and text areas is no longer necessary because today’s assistive technology can handle empty controls correctly.

These are examples of priority 3 checkpoints. If organisations were to achieve the highest level of accessibility as defined by WCAG 1.0, they would likely do more damage than good and waste a lot of time making fiddly adjustments that have no impact on the end user. Conversely, some of the priority 3 checkpoints (such as ensuring links follow a logical tab order) have a massive impact on users and deserve more prominence.

It’s been a long time coming, but WCAG 2.0, a radical overhaul of the guidelines, is expected to be finalised some time in 2008, perhaps as early as the first quarter. Designers will first have to get their heads around a change in terminology. WCAG 2.0 is built around the principles of making websites perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Guidelines are organised within these categories, but the checkpoints of old have been enhanced with success criteria.

Using the success criteria, it’s much easier for web designers to understand how to satisfy the guidelines. As an example, under WCAG 1.0, designers were reminded to ensure that foreground and background colour combinations provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone who has colour deficits or a black and white screen. Under WCAG 2.0, guideline 1.4 simplifies the language (“make it easy to distinguish foreground information from its background”), and explains how to do that. For AA standard accessibility, there should be a contrast ratio of at least 5:1 and for AAA, the ratio should be 7:1 or higher. There are links to tools to measure the contrast ratio too.

Web designers are invited to discuss their suggested techniques and workarounds. This social networking aspect should ensure that even after the guidelines are finalised, their implementation can move with the times.

Site owners should prepare for the transition to WCAG 2.0. Any new sites should be evaluated using it, and accessibility policies should be updated in preparation. The transition to WCAG 2.0 should enable websites to focus more on changes that will help end users, and to win more business by further improving the user experience. The guidelines are even longer than WCAG 1.0 but the Quick Reference can be customised and provides a great introduction.

While there’s going to be a great deal of work for most people in understanding the new guidelines, the whole process can be speeded up by testing with actual users as early as possible. Despite the advances in WCAG 2.0, the difference between technical accessibility and making a side usable by a wide range of people with disabilities will remain huge.

By Mark Gristock

Dear Santa,

I don’t know if you have the internet at the North Pole, but if you do you may have seen the recent report published by the UN into the significant number of websites that fail to meet basic accessibility criteria.

This type of report comes out several times a year, and is picked up by some publication or other as the horror story of the day, but nothing ever changes.

The fundamental issue behind the failure of accessibility to take off is the lack of a business driver. Legal compliance hasn’t provided enough of a stick to be effective. Maybe it’s time to try a carrot.

This has led to a lack of skill and knowledge in the design and development industry as a whole. Accessibility is not easy enough to teach, because there is no definitive right answer – different users have different requirements, and different techniques have different impacts on user groups. Given that it’s not easy, only clients demanding it will force people to start looking at accessibility seriously – and that’s when we’ll get real innovation.

What’s really depressing is that there is nothing new or surprising in this report. The internet is the biggest tool of social change I’ve seen in my lifetime, but the disabled are being left out. This is too big an issue to leave to individual, unregulated ‘specialists’ giving inconsistent advice with nobody holding them to account.

As a magical creature that spreads good cheer around the world, you know as well as I do that there are good people and bad people out there – those that want to make the best sites they can, and those that want to make a fast buck.

I’d like you to take the bad people off your Christmas list.

Accessibility is essential if the internet is to help bring equality to the world. It’s too important to wait for legislation or for the industry to self-regulate – we’ve seen that doesn’t work. We’ve got to create a framework where businesses want and need to do it, and the information on the requirements of disabled users is freely available – and comes directly from the users themselves.

I appreciate that this is a radical solution, but I want the world to be a better place. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result, and I’m bored of being insane.

So Santa, all I want for Christmas is for people to realise how important accessibility is, and actually do something about it. And ideally I’d like it to fit into my stocking.

Love to Rudolf,

Mark

P.S. Oh, and while you’re at it, world peace please. And an Evel Knievel stunt bike.

By Lis Shorten

Recently, we’ve seen so-called experts saying that you don’t need to conduct accessibility tests. Our own experience working with leading websites tells us otherwise.

If you’re committed to making your website usable with assistive devices, accessibility testing is essential. An audit can weed out obvious problems and can check your site against the guidelines. But there can be a gulf between technical compliance with the guidelines and a website that is truly accessible and usable.

We’ve been working for over a year with one of the UK’s leading banks. Through accessibility audits, we were able to coach the company to achieving AA compliance. That means the site satisfied all the priority 1 & 2 checkpoints, which should remove significant barriers to accessing web documents.

When we carried out accessibility testing, we found there was still work to be done. There were many issues that the guidelines did not address and some of these turned out to be major barriers. The testing showed that:

• Users of screen magnifiers found it hard to navigate pages that had large areas of white space between content, or between text and the related buttons. Users were forced to scroll around the screen excessively – taking much longer to perform simple actions.
• Text that stretched to fill the page was hard for people with dyslexia and users of screen magnifiers to read. While users could have reduced the size of the window, they usually didn’t think to do that. It made for a tiring and frustrating experience.
• The screen reader Jaws, when used in table mode, couldn’t identify links that were also table headings. This meant that screen reader users lost part of the page functionality altogether.

An accessibility audit is vital to avoid tests being wasted on problems that can be quickly spotted by an expert. But once companies have achieved an appropriate level of technical compliance, they should consider testing a natural progression. Apart from identifying new or overlooked problems, testing makes clear just how significant these barriers are for people attempting to conduct business online.

I was at the gym on 2 January, like many others, and I bumped into the New Media Industry. He was puffing away on a treadmill. After our workouts, we had a coffee and he started telling me about how he’s turned over a new leaf. This is what he said:

“I can’t keep calling myself ‘New Media’. It’s unbecoming in an industry of my age. My voice has broken. I’ve grown hair in places I can only hint at and I’m in a serious relationship with business. Time to bin the Converse and t-shirts and start acting like a grown-up.

“One of the signs of growing up is to stop using stupid made up terms. Adding the latest buzz words to your dictionary, saying 2.0 a lot and sticking ‘ability’ at the end of perfectly good words doesn’t help you talk to business. It makes you sound like a professional footballer.

“My second resolution is to start being honest about my limitations. When I really was a new industry, I could get by doing everything. A bit of website design. A bit of marketing. The odd bit of usability. Now, I have to accept that I can’t do a good job of it all. I must not tell people I can do usability and accessibility if I’m really a design specialist, or vice versa. Customers understand the distinct skills the different disciplines need and won’t pay for substandard work any more. Companies that can’t be honest or aren’t good enough to specialise will go out of business, and the rest of us will then be able to charge rates that fairly reflect our experience, expertise and value to the customer.

“2007 will be a year for more serious relationships. I’ve had it with these one-night stands, throwing together a website and never hearing from a client again. I’ll focus on quality work, and build life-long partnerships with my clients. We’ll understand each other intimately, which will be a solid foundation for continuous improvement of the online experience. I want clients to talk to me when they have problems or ideas for improvement, not start shopping for a new vendor.

“My final resolution is to stop biting my nails and be more confident. I created some fantastic online experiences last year, and got much smarter at interactive advertising and multichannel campaigns. I should be proud of what I’ve achieved and let it inspire me to even greater heights in the year ahead.”

spent an interesting afternoon at the annual E-Consultancy User Experience roundtable. When you bring together the leading customer-focused businesses and the UK’s most successful consultancies, you are guaranteed a vigorous and stimulating discussion.

The latest fashion for dynamic websites, which refresh within the page, was hotly debated. The introduction of so-called AJAX websites is causing usability and accessibility best practice to diverge. There are a lot of usability best practice guidelines encapsulated in the WCAG accessibility guidelines but AJAX websites can provide a better user experience for many while introducing problems for users of assistive devices.

Where AJAX is used for the heart of the website, it can result in an inaccessible user experience. Serenata Flowers was held up as an example of an accessible website that uses AJAX to enhance the user experience, but which also functions fully without the animation.

Discussion around the table revealed that AJAX sites cost four times as much to develop. Regarding how much should be spent on user centred design, two rules of thumb were proposed: 10% of a project budget, or half the design budget.

One question was whether there is such a thing as a ‘textbook’ defining best practice web design. E-Consultancy’s own research found that there were as many as 11 different ways that online shops ask people to enter the validation code on the back of their credit card. Clients wanted to know if anyone had defined the ‘right answers’ to such process design challenges.

Some people seemed to want something for nothing: they were asking the usability agencies to put their research into the public domain, on a centralised website. But that is problematic because there is rarely a universal right answer to design questions. Best practice depends on the client, its goals and its user base. Publishing results from tests with other sites could lead to misleading conclusions when the conclusions are misapplied elsewhere.

Some clients also failed to appreciate the expense involved in acquiring research results, which would make it bad business to give them away. Foviance hires psychology and human factors graduates, and we need to be able to charge for our services so that we can continue the good work we do. Certification in the industry might help the industry to appreciate the skillset of usability professionals.