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 in Web sites. WAI encourages a broad range of Web sites and Web applications to use WCAG 2.0 at this stage, and share implementation experience.
- Web Accessibility Initiative Interest Group mail list

As an example, I plan to submit an implementation for success criteria 1.2.6 Sign Language, I have expertise in this area but average video editing skills. In order to implement this effectively by the due date, I’ve had to find someone with video editing skills.

My plan is to provide and record Auslan interpreting at a couple of my upcoming conference presentations and then upload them to my site. Hopefully other local Deaf organisations will do the same.

Important Dates

So if you’re interested in a little bit of grass roots people power, jot down these dates, blog about it and see if you can get involved too.

23 May 2008 - Register your intent to provide implementations of WCAG 2 requirements.
30 June 2008 - Provide implementation experience to the WAI and/or comments on barrier to adoption of requirements.

Relevant Links

And finally, if you want to get involved, you may find these links helpful:

• Instructions for Implementors
• WCAG 2 Candidate Recommendation Implementation form
• Implementation Information Form

Let us know if you submit and implementation to WAI and we’ll talk about it some more here.

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 provide links to a couple of documents that deal with mobile web accessibility and how we can better design and develop mobile sites for users with disabilities:

• The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a guide for making a Web site accessible to people with disabilities.
• The Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) is a guide for making a Web site usable from a mobile device.

There is also a great deal of information over at the Mobile Web Initiative Best Practices Working Group blog (MWI BPWG).

The Open Letter Initiative

This morning via my RSS I came across an article on a favourite blog of mine by iheni on The Open Letter Initiative (you may also know Henny from the Web Access Centre blog). The Open Letter Initiative, which commenced in November 2007, was spurred by Google’s announcement of the open mobile platform Android. The letter reads:

This open letter is addressed to companies from the mobile technologie (sic) sector, developers, research scientists, organisations, politicians and all kinds of disseminators (sic)as well. The open letter informs about the perfect mobile device for blind persons, screen reader software for mobile platforms, mobile internet access, satellite navigation for blind pedestrians, mobile access to map data, accuracy of GPS receivers, self-help, commonalities of blindness and dyslexia/illiteracy, accessibility, corporate responsibility, proposals for Nokia’s and Google’s public relations and the importance of free software and affordable cell phones for the many blind people from developing or newly industrializing countries.

What Do We Want? Discussion! When Do We Want It? Now!

What I’d really like to see is a lot more information presented by web community groups and industry nights that focus on accessibility issues for the mobile web. I don’t give a toss about what the latest Nokia is, or what cool data plan 3 is offering at the moment. I want presentations, discussions and tutorials. I want to hear real people talking about their experiences and I want us to do it now.

Of course the groups I’ve mentioned here are all Australian, and this is not an issue specific to us. Are other countries addressing this better than we are? I’d say so… but how?

Getting Started

Being from Australia means that I’m most aware of the local Australian industry groups you might contact here. But there are no doubt many more in your local area too. For those of you outside Australia, what are the best industry groups to contact? Let us know.

If you’re in Australia, you can contact any of the following organisations and tell them you want to see more discussion around mobile web accessibility:

• AIMIA
• Australian Web Industry Association
• Mobile Monday Local chapters listing
• WIPA
• WSG

All it takes is for us, the community, to speak more loudly. Contact the industry groups you’re involved with and tell them you want to know more. Better still, put something together and present it yourself. But don’t forget to let me know… I want to come along and see it!

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 phone. Needless to say, it didn’t help the cause.

Within six months though, I’d started using Twitter in a sort of if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em response. I started to like it and even got to know some people better than before.

Getting a Second Life

Then one day about eight months ago, via a chance meeting in Second Life, I met a fine chap by the name of Hugo Sharp. Hugo and I got chatting as I stopped to alleviate a case of flight induced kinetosis. While he was having incredible trouble figuring out how to sit on a seat, I felt like I was about to vomit on my desk. Nice way to meet someone for the first time. So after quickly establishing that I had no idea how to help him sit, we got chatting about things in our first life, connected on Twitter and most likely Googled the bejesus out of each other.

The interesting thing to come out of that short conversation was that Hugo had a keen interest in wine, hosted The Oz Wine Show podcast and was close to launching a new Australian wine site, Project Vino. As a wine collector, this all sounded pretty interesting and I was thrilled that there was something being launched in Australia.

At that point I’d been a member of Corkd for quite some time, but there’s just so much they’re not doing with the site. For me, wine is about sharing, being social and appreciating the subtleties of each new bottle you open. Unfortunately there’s no real sense of community on Corkd. In fact, there’s not much that draws me there except a desire to keep track of my cellar, and even that could be done so much better. Even when I’m cataloguing my cellar, I can’t help noticing usability flaws and other areas for improvement.

Where’s that drink?

So I guess you could say Twitter’s turning me to drink. Tomorrow night, April 30th, 7:00pm AEST, will see the launch of the world’s first ever Twitter wine tasting.

Twelve prominent Australian Twitter users will take part in an evolutionary new twist on the traditional wine tasting format. What separates this wine tasting is that the participants could be anywhere in the world. They could be in front of their computer at home or on their mobile phone in middle of the Sturt Desert. All will be connected in real-time however by the latest and greatest online communication tool - Twitter.

- Project Vino

Now while I’m far from a ‘prominent Australian Twitter user’, I am on there occasionally and I do like a nice glass of wine.

But what’s the point of it all?

Part real life user testing, part marketing, part social experiment. I’ll be doing something I like (wine tasting) with people I probably wouldn’t have been able to meet up with all on the one night. Twitter is simply a tool that’s allowing us to connect as a group in real time, with an ability to broadcast to a much larger audience. So whether it’s for the wine, the technology or the experience, it’s going to be different, that’s for sure. And I’m anticipating a great user experience!

So if you’re into wine, Twitter, or just want to observe an online community participating in a real time physical event, tune into @ProjectVino via Summize on April 30 and pour yourself a glass too.

Event Details

Twitter Wine Tasting 1 – Kirrihill Wines
April 30, 2008
First wine: 7:00pm AEST
Second wine: 7:15pm AEST
Third wine: 7:30pm AEST
@projectvino on Twitter / Sumarize

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 Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World, Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer, David Verba
• Thoughts on Interaction Design, Jon Kolko
• Don’t Make Me Think (sample chapter), Steve Krug
• Designing for People, Henry Dreyfuss
• A Designer’s Art, Paul Rand
• Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte
• The Universal Principles of Design, William Lidwell, Kristina Holden & Jill Butler
• Interaction Design: Beyond Human Computer Interaction, Sharp, Rogers & Preece
• Designing the obvious (pdf sample chapter) Robert Hoekman, jr.

Now it’s pretty likely that none of these are going to make Oprah’s book club for 2008, but don’t let that stop you!

So what’s the ‘One Book’ you’d recommend to User Experience newbies? And which one’s your fave?

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.

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 provide them with navigation labels that are quick to digest. However it’s obvious that we shouldn’t use every billboard that we come across as inspiration.

The moral of this story is that, when deciding upon the words to use for your navigation items, it’s really important to use language that your audience knows and understands immediately, without them having to delve deep into the limits of their vocabulary and figure it out. Exactly what that language is depends on your site and your audience — if your site is for teens, then it may be perfectly acceptable to call the link for your Contact Us page “Write Us, Yo”. For most sites, however, you’re better off sticking with the much safer Contact or Contact Us.

PS. I found out later that an arrester bed is in fact an emergency ramp, available for drivers of vehicles (usually trucks) whose brakes have failed. The ramp provides a safer way of coming to a stop than the barrier gate or a tree. It may be an American term; personally, I’d have preferred to see it called “Emergency Safety Ramp”. In the heat of the moment, that’s going to require less brain power on the driver’s behalf, thus potentially saving more lives.

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 anything in your nearest city. There are things going on from Kigali to Moscow, Prague, Manila, Tucson and even Sydney - which is where I’ll be ;)

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 get into the rights and wrongs of that particular case; it’s an issue that cuts very deeply to the heart of what we think of as our “rights”, and that’s one can of worms I just don’t want to open. I know what I think; you know what you think; enough said.

But I am going to take this opportunity to re-inforce what I believe is the nature of our professionalism. We should make an effort to create accessible content, because it’s part of our job. And frankly, it doesn’t take much effort; it’s not difficult.

Nobody’s expecting perfection. Nobody in their right mind ascends to the notion that everyone is equal, or that life is fair. People aren’t equal, and life isn’t fair. But that makes it even more important that we attempt to redress imbalances when we encounter them.

What we do is not rocket science — I won’t say it’s easy, but it’s not spectacularly difficult either. HTML was designed with accessibility in mind, and it provides the hooks and meta-information to make content more accessible: alt text for images; caption, summary and headers for tables; good heading structure; semantic use of paragraphs, lists and other structural markup. Used properly, our tools will do the job. Used badly, they create barriers.

And technology is the one area of human endeavour where that simply isn’t acceptable. Technology is not like the physical world, where there are good, tangible reasons why some things can never be accessible. A person who’s blind will never win the Grand Prix; someone in a wheelchair will never be able to climb Uluru. Technology is not like the physical world — technology can take any shape. Technology is our slave, and we can make it do what we want.

If we call ourselves professionals, we owe it to our clients, their clients, and ourselves, to do our job properly. A chef must care about health, a builder must care about safety, and we must care about accessibility.

Get educated!

Here are some external links that will help you to build more accessible web sites:

• Dive Into Accessibility — Mark Pilgrim’s excellent introduction to web accessibility
• Accessify — Tools, wizards, articles and tutorials on web accessibility
• WebAim — Information, training, resources, guidelines and standards for web accessibility and disability access to the web

And a few SitePoint resources:

• Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML & CSS — Ian Lloyd’s comprehensive book for beginners shows how to build websites properly from the ground up
• Accessible JavaScript: Beyond the Mouse — an overview of techniques for making JavaScript accessible to the keyboard as well as the mouse

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.

Lisa proposed a more sensible, holistic approach: one where the responsibility for producing an accessible site is shared by every member of the team, according to their strengths. To show how this might work, she started with the accessibility checklist provided by the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and assigned each of the sixteen WCAG Priority 1 checkpoints to one or more members of a typical web development team (content developer, designer, frontend developer, information architect, and scripter).

Lisa stressed that building accessible web sites still requires formal accessibility testing by a specialist, but that sharing the responsibility as she suggested would enable this to be limited to relatively brief testing phases conducted by accessibility specialists working on contract, rather than a full-time member of the team.

Lisa plans to publish her role-specific WCAG checklists shortly. In the meantime, check out the slides from her talk and watch for the podcast on the Web Directions web site.

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 engaged and intrigued.

The Focus group in Second Life was conducted as a trial to test its feasibility for future use, and as such a second focus group was conducted in parallel, in the physical world. This allowed them to benchmark the findings gathered in Second Life against those that were recorded during the traditional focus group session.

The Session in Second Life was run similarly to how we would conduct a focus group ‘in real life’. Participants were recruited (as they teleported in), screened and scheduled for the session just as we normally would.

During the session, participants signed a code of conduct and consent forms, and received instructions on how the session would be run. ‘Virtual Participants’ were recruited from both Australia and the UK, with the focus group being recorded with a media camera and chat logger.

Things that worked

• There was a high level of feedback
• Participants were comfortable
• There was a good level of interaction with the participants
• The focus group had an international reach, which was a requirement of the testing
• Findings of the online session matched those recorded in the offline session

Things that didn’t work so well

• Online sessions took about one and a half times as long (i.e. 1.5 hrs online and 1hr offline)
• There were multiple conversation threads running at the same time, which were difficult to track
• The response time of some participants was slow
• It was confusing if participants weren’t identified directly by name during discussion, as it was at times difficult to indicate who the focus group facilitator was addressing

Lessons Learned

• Fewer participants (maximum 4) would be easier to manage
• There was a need for more facilitators than usual (minimum two)
• More time was required than usual
• Using coloured text instead of everyone having the same colour would be useful, particularly between facilitators and participants
• Payment to participants must be immediate in the virtual world or people get nervous
• It’s essential (as in the real world) that the screener isn’t leading, as it’s impossible to know what the participants are really like
• Get the right people – open, talkative, respectful and interested
• Facilitators must be able to type quickly, multitask and know the platform
• Give a focused response – use the participants name when addressing them
• Summarise the participants feedback so that they know you have heard and understood them (eye contact isn’t possible online)
• Be clear that you’ve finished talking about a particular topic and that you’re moving on to the next one.

From my perspective, the biggest barrier to entry would be setting up the virtual space and building the focus group facilities online. As an independent consultant, that’s a massive effort that I’m unlikely to invest in. Even for smaller companies it’s a huge amount of work.

But it is interesting… *very interesting*.

It’s an example of how technology is allowing us to change the way we work. No doubt there are a lot of questions about the validity of the participants recruited for the Second Life Focus Group. But I’m a firm believer that most of what happens online can happen offline and vice versa. I’ve interviewed a few doubtful characters myself over the last few years, despite rigorous screeners. So Hyro’s report that results from the virtual focus group were very similar to that of the real life focus group is a good sign and perhaps not too much of a surprise after all.