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Usability 2.0
: Usability BlogWCAG 2 Requirements at Risk
Since April 30, when the WCAG 2.0 Candidate Recommendation (CR) was released, there has been a ton of posts across the web telling us the WCAG 2 is almost, almost complete.
I’m not here to do that. The news is 5 days old and I have no intention of clogging up your RSS by regurgitating the same content… as important as it is.
What I do want to highlight is that there are a number of WCAG 2 requirements at risk.
It is important to note that some WCAG 2.0 requirements are at risk; that is, they may not be included if there are not sufficient implementations [By 30 June 2008].
- Web Accessibility Initiative Interest Group mail list
Get Involved
I would urge you to take a look at each of the At Risk requirements to see if there are any relevant to your area of expertise that you are able to implement over the next couple of months. Alternatively, there may be someone with complementary skills that requires your assistance in implementing one of the at risk requirements.
The primary purpose of this CR stage is for developers and designers to “test drive” WCAG 2.0 to demonstrate that WCAG 2.0 can be implemented …
The Open Letter Initiative and the Mobile Web
One of the things I find absolutely frustrating about the web community in Sydney is the lack of information at industry nights and other local web events about mobile accessibility and, in particular, anything related to the W3C and Mobile Web Best Practices.
For the most part seminars and industry nights hosted by the Mobile Monday guys or AIMIA focus on marketing, advertising, gaming and identifying ways of further monetising the mobile industry. BORING. I’ve even stopped attending the Mobile Monday events because they appear to have such little interest in promoting any discussion around best practices or mobile accessibility.
Given that these are the two most prominent Australian industry groups hosting discussions on mobile technology at the moment, it seems pretty obvious that there’s little interest in this area for either group. Even the Web Standards Group has had very few mobile related events.
Mobile Means Mobility
Mobile use is at an all time high globally and it offers affordable access to the web for a huge proportion of people including many users with disabilities. It’s time for industry groups to get back on track and deliver informative sessions on how we can produce accessible, usable web content.
The W3C WAI Mobile pages …
Twitter’s turning me to drink
About a year and a half ago I was totally over Twitter. When I say “over it”, I mean So Over It that I couldn’t even get Into It. Twitter was new, I didn’t know many people using it, and all the twits and tweets seemed so utterly self indulgent… some would say, many still are. To make matters worse, my husband is an EEO (early, early, adopter); if he can beta test something, he will. So when Twitter came along, he was pretty excited.
Like many others, I didn’t really get the relevance of Twitter. To some extent I thought it was a prime display of insecurity via the Look at Me channel. As someone who really struggled with the decision of whether or not I should even enable comments on my blog, Twitter was a real challenge.
I saw it as a one-on-one activity (i.e. person - device) rather than a one-to-many relationship via the device. Face to face conversations were interrupted by regular mobile beeps alerting a DM (not a Deep and Meaningful, but rather a Direct Message), and in one instance I was even woken up at 3am no less, by a message alert on my partners …
Oprah’s Book Club? I don’t think so…
Some of you will already know The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) mail list. For those that don’t know it, the website and mail list are great resources and sources of discussion for anyone interested in interaction design, user experience and design.
The IxDA is a member-supported organization committed to serving the needs of the international interaction design community. With the help of more than 1,500 members worldwide, we provide a forum for the discussion of interaction design issues.
Now, as Michael Jackson once said: “I’m a lurker, not a writer”.. OK well maybe that was me. But all the same, there’s been a really good discussion going on over the last few days that I’ve been watching with great interest. List members have been posting ‘The One Book’ they’d recommend to Engineering Management folk (or anyone else for that matter, I’d venture).
So without further ado, here’s a summary of some great reading on User Experience, Usability, and Interaction Design:
- The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper
- Designing from Both Sides of the Screen: How Designers and Engineers Can Collaborate to Build Cooperative Technology, Ellen Isaacs & Alan Walendowski
- Communicating Design, Dan Brown
- The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman
- Subject To …
WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has released a last call for comments on the working draft of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0… again:
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group invites you to review the second WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft published on 11 December 2007. WCAG 2.0 explains how to make Web sites, applications, and other content accessible to people with disabilities. Please submit any comments on the following document by 1 February 2008.
This second WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft is provided for public review of the document now that it has all resolutions from previous comments incorporated. The WCAG Working Group hopes that it has resolved all substantive issues with this draft, and looks forward to progressing to the next stages in completing WCAG 2.0.
Leave your comments on whether you think any progress has been made here at the W3C site.
Design Great Billboards
We can learn a lot about designing usable web sites from the offline world.
For instance, when I was in Adelaide a couple of weeks ago visiting family, I took a drive around the Adelaide Hills. Cruising along the freeway at 120 kms/hr, I passed the sign in the picture on the right. The first thing that popped into my head was “What the heck does that mean?”
I’m not sure what it’s like in your part of the world, but when I was last living in Adelaide, South Australia, the term arrester bed definitely wasn’t common language.
(I was half expecting to see an intimidating king-size mattress in full police uniform step out from the bushes and order me to pull over.)
The second thing that popped into my head — and this is possibly an indication that I spend far too much time online — was this:
“Imagine if something similarly obscure was used to describe a tab on a web site. No-one would know what the text linked to!”
Steve Krug wrote about this very concept — that we should think of our users as driving by in a car, and …
World Usability Day 2007
World Usability Day is an international, annual event that will be held on November 8th this year with the theme of Health.
The main goal of the event is to promote and encourage usability in the wider community and will be held at various locations world wide .
Last year 40,000 people in 35 countries in 175 cities around the world participated in World Usability Day. This year marks the events 3rd anniversary.
- Sydney UPA
If you’re interested in hearing about what’s going on in your city, have a look on line and think about attending an event if you can. Some events have sessions running all day, which makes it much easier to attend even some of the presentations.
While my focus is always on web usability, the World Usability Day event will look at a usability in a wide array of settings. For example, Melbourne’s event will be touring the learning facility of St Vincents hospital.
If you’re in London, 15 free places are available in a 1 day course offering an Introduction to User Centred Design.
Of course, there are dozens of events going on world wide, so have a look and see if there’s …
Why Accessibility? Because It’s Our Job!
I go through phases of complacency and disbelief when thinking about web accessibility.
Working at SitePoint HQ, I’m fairly lucky in that everybody here is on the same page when it comes to accessibility; we spend time making sure our sites are accessible, that our applications degrade gracefully, that our JavaScript doesn’t create barriers for screenreader users. We do this ad-hoc, without even a firm sense of whether our target demographic ultimately requires it. And for no reason other than it’s our job. In the books, articles and other content we publish, best practice is right at the top of the priorities list.
But not everyone in our community agrees, as the original forum thread over the Target case and the recent catfight on TechCrunch illustrated. And I think that’s pretty sad — not because these folks are disagreeing per se (I’d rather see healthy debate than tacit compliance), but because so many of the anti-accessibility arguments are ignorant rhetoric, which cloud the issue and make useful discussion harder for everyone. They generally follow a familiar pattern, taking a peculiarly American line in favour of market forces determining everything, and criticizing any idealistic intentions as political-correctness gone mad.
Whatever. I’m not going to …
Usability: More than Skin Deep at Web Directions
At Web Directions South 2007 in Sydney, SitePoint usability blogger Lisa Herrod (aka Scenario Girl) proposed a new way of looking at usability and accessibility within the web design process. Not only does her approach point the way to better user experience design, but it also brings formal accessibility testing within reach of small web development teams!
Lisa led off boldly with what I felt was a tough sell to some members of the audience: that user experience design is by definition incomplete unless it takes accessibility into account at every stage of a project. To soften the blow, however, she demonstrated how the ‘personas’ used in usability work could be adapted to include common disabilities without diminishing their usefulness for gauging other usability factors.
No matter how you approach it, of course, accounting for accessibility within the development of a site is going to mean more work. But whose work should it be? Most businesses can’t afford to have a full-time accessibility expert on staff, and will either call in a contractor to do a last-minute accessibility review, or put the responsibility on the shoulders of the front-end designer.
User testing in Second Life
Oz-IA ran over the weekend in Sydney and it was a fantastic event.
There were some really interesting presentations, and while I didn’t get to all of them, without doubt the most interesting for me was User Research in Virtual Worlds, a presentation I highlighted earlier as being one I wanted to see.
Gary Bunker and Gabriele Hermansson, both from Hyro, spoke for close to an hour about their experiences in setting up and running an experimental focus group within Second Life.
Now that virtual worlds (such as SecondLife and World of Warcraft) are becoming vastly more popular, Hyro set out to build a research platform that would allow us to research users within those worlds, not only for their experiences there but also for their needs outside of it. We wanted to know if we could use virtual research – focus groups, interviews and user testing – in a practical way in design projects requiring complex user input. We also wanted to understand how user behavior would change between real-world and virtual forums.
Going into the presentation I was somewhat skeptical about how they might have conducted the evaluation, but by the end of the session I was really very …
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