The future of web accessibility

Where are we now?

It's been seven years since the W3C released the first version of the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG 1.0). Since then, accessibility has slowly but surely turned up on the radar of web managers in most large organisations.

The benefits of accessibility are pretty well known too - a quick returns over 37 million results! Because of this, more and more large profile websites have offered better and better accessibility as the years have gone by. There's still a long way to go but the progress over the past few years is highly visible and indeed positive.

Web 2.0

refers to the ‘next generation’ of websites and online applications. Websites using Web 2.0 technologies have started to spring up all over the Internet, and are likely to exponentially increase in number over the next few years. Although the term itself, Web 2.0, has become a bit of a buzzword, there's no doubt that Web 2.0 is here and is becoming more and more commonplace.

Two characteristics of Web 2.0 include AJAX and user generated content. Many websites are beginning to embrace these two concepts, causing never-before seen accessibility issues...

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Digital Convergence: Insight into the future of Web design

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Much of what is written about the Web has to do with the problems developers encounter today, such as a lack of uniform standards and accessibility compliance. While on one hand that is appropriate—providing knowledge and skills for today’s challenges—on the other, this tight focus on the here-and-now is doing us a disservice. We continue to operate in a reactive space, one where the way we are thinking is not attuned to the opportunities of tomorrow. It keeps us on a perpetual treadmill, thinking and working in a tactical and compartmentalized way. We view the work we do narrowly, in the moment, not understanding the greater context, much less the startling changes that are just over the horizon.

The future of Web design is one of integrated specialization. Whereas the Web exists now as a major cultural force, something that has changed the human paradigm and demonstrably altered reality, its role will become increasingly smaller and more specialized. That does not mean that it will be any less complicated or less important. Rather, instead of being the brash virtuoso, it will join an ever-growing and complicated symphony.

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Where are we most stimulated? At the Web's edge.

Where are the greatest opportunities, and the greatest risks? At the Web's edge—the places where the Web is just beginning to take root: the industries, geographies, and applications that have yet to be conquered by the Web's wide reach.

For the past three years, the Web 2.0 Summit has explored ideas which have already begun to slip into the mainstream. This year, we'll highlight news from unusual suspects—the enthusiasts and dreamers touching the edges of spaces not yet conquered by the Web, as well as established players who are looking to expand into new and previously unimaginable realms.

How is the Web infiltrating new beachheads in areas we never thought it could—or would? What are the majors doing at the edge, at the loony "ten percent time" at Google, in the labs at MSN, IBM, etc., that might inform entirely new applications, opportunities, even threats? What are the edge startups promising to redefine the center? What are the things we wish or know the Web can do, but so far, is failing us? What are the edges in terms of policy, politics, and morality?

Join us at the fourth annual Web 2.0 Summit at the Palace Hotel, as together we explore the Web's edge.

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Creating a Universal Usability Agenda

“HAVA called for improved standards for voting systems and required that they allow individuals with disabilities to vote “in a manner that provides the same opportunity for access and participation (including privacy and independence) as for other voters.”

Disclaimer: The views in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Elections Assistance Commission or the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

How do you keep usability, accessibility, and user experience requirements on track while developing standards? It is part of the very nature of standards to focus on details—and in the process, to sometimes lose sight of the real goals. This is especially true when a standards-making process goes on for a long time, a situation is highly political, or most people are focused on technology issues. For over two years, I’ve worked in just such a situation as part of the (TGDC) creating federal standards for voting systems in the United States.

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) mandated the TGDC and its members—who include election officials, members of the US Access Board, and other experts, working with scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The TGDC is an advisory committee, so we don’t actually create regulations or standards, but offer our advice to the (EAC).

For most people, the mention of voting systems conjures up one of two thoughts: either the hanging chads of a terrible usability disaster during the 2000 presidential election or the need for paper audit trails and the importance of security in voting systems. With everything that people have written and said about security, transparency, trust, and the necessity of our being able to accurately recount ballots, it’s easy for something like usability to seem like a trivial “nice to have.”

But it does matter, and HAVA called for improved standards for voting systems and required that they allow individuals with disabilities to vote “in a manner that provides the same opportunity for access and participation (including privacy and independence) as for other voters.” (HAVA 301(a)(3)). The subcommittee on Human Factors and Privacy is responsible for drafting guidelines for usability and accessibility, according to the provisions of this law.

“Standards are all about details, and it’s only too easy to lose sight of the big picture while writing and debating specific requirements.”

This article looks at how we created an agenda to guide our work, including decisions about how to create the new requirements. Our approach is also applicable in other situations, such as creating usability guidelines for a product or focusing corporate attention on user experience.

Standards are all about details, and it’s only too easy to lose sight of the big picture while writing and debating specific requirements. A committee of appointed members not only brings together different perspectives, but means there will likely be process, political, and administrative overhead. Sound familiar?

To combat this entropy, we created a set of guiding principles and voted to adopt them as official Viewed as a whole, the following resolutions created an agenda for a universal approach to the usability and accessibility of voting systems:

• By agreeing on basic principles in advance, the committee could focus on the details of a complex standard with a shared understanding of its goals.
• By defining relationships and important dependencies at the beginning of the project, longer-term work could start immediately, so it would be ready when needed.
• The resolutions could span the development of several versions of the standard.

These resolutions provide both a high-level view of our usability and accessibility goals, as well as specific directives for how to organize the work. This was important for a committee that included many stakeholders, not just user experience and human factors experts. Most importantly, the resolutions define the full scope of the project, and we can use them as a measure of success for the completed standard.

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authorUrl: http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000136.php
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Some Historical Usability Research

Why We Have the Guidelines We Do

At last weekend, I picked up a collection of papers on usability from 1988, edited by

One paper from this collection, Systems Interfaces Revisited, (then Libraries and Information Systems Director), is particularly interesting — it discusses the underlying human needs in interface design, dramatically increasing the value of modern web usability guidelines by answering why modern studies reach the conclusions they do.

(As an aside, older papers like this are also interesting when they show their age: “CD-ROM is another potentially significant technology for information delivery.”)

From Babylon to the Present

Penniman starts with historical context:

In 490 B.C., the fastest way to send a message was through a human messenger running as fast and as far as he could... The data rate for that “system” was well under one word per minute... no really universal breakthrough came until the invention of telegraphy in the 1840s.

He points out that while cuneiform tablets could store one character per cubic inch, and modern technology can store 125 billion characters per cubic inch, humans are still only capable of processing about 300 words or symbols per minutes.

The mathematically inclined reader can compute: a Sumerian of 4000 B.C. could get through a cubic inch of data in one-fifth of a second, but us moderns require several centuries to process all the information that could be tightly packed onto one cubic inch of a hard drive platter.

Nothing groundbreaking here, but interesting for its own sake.

Ideal Systems

Penniman cites a 1959 checklist for the “ideal information service” by Harry Goodwin of The list, paraphrased by Penniman, is profoundly familiar.

Users want:

• to get information desired
• at the time it is desired
• in briefest form
• in order of importance
• with auxiliary information
• and indications of reliability
• and authority of the information and its source
• to exert minimum effort
• to be screened from undesired or untimely information, and
• to know negative results are reliable.

Remembering that this is a list from 1959, let’s look at some of its points again, in the context of contemporary web usability best practices:

Users are looking to get information:

• in briefest form (we know and guidelines advise us to
• in order of importance (dictates placing the and providing details for those interested further on)
• with auxiliary information such as graphs, charts, and audio or video content, as well as links for further reading)

This is from 1959. Clearly, the data collects about how people use the web comes from something deeply ingrained in the way humans search for information. Modern usability guidelines are simply recapitulations of what librarians and behavioral scientists have known for decades, specifically tuned to the medium of the web.

Behavioral Models

So why do we, and why is it important that we follow usability guidelines?

Pennman cites a 1971 piece of research by McGuire and Stanley in t about the conceptual models people use when approaching information storage and retrieval systems:

• When confronted with a problem, individuals draw on past models (model development).
• New models are built from old models as well as observation (consolidation models).
• Similar experiences among different individuals elicit different models due to the consolidation process.
• After “understanding” (model formation) is achieved, disconfirmation is very difficult.
• Well-developed models are not systematically checked once formed by the user. Assumptions are made early and last long.

As web professionals, there isn’t actually anything new here for us. We know that it’s bad form to deviate from de facto standards for exactly these reasons.

E.g.: Users — they’ve developed a model of web sites where that is where a search box can be found. Placing our search box in a different location means that it won’t be seen, because users are not actively questioning their models.

Yet as we also know, and as the point about similar experiences among different users eliciting different models implies, not every standard is a standard among all users. Take the examples of. We know that good design means that needs of both of these models are met.

What Does it Mean?

Penniman concludes that:

• Unique behavior and individual differences define the outer limits of the system and the degree to which it must adapt to a variety of user characteristics.
• Groupings of behaviors define shared models and will lead to the design of tailored components and command structures.
• Group behavior differences define the varieties of models that will be necessary to adequately serve all users.

The short version: apply guidelines and standards that have correctly identified trends among majorities and subgroups of web users. (But you already knew that.)

Back to our ancient Sumerian with his clay tablet. The fundamental problem with the web is that there is more information available than any person could be expected to process in a lifetime. If the sites you work on have more than a few thousand pages, your corner of the web alone is beyond what most folks will ever be able to perceive.

By following published usability and accessibility guidelines, and by understanding the psychology behind them, we are able to produce work that is findable, scannable, navigable, and usable. We are able to tackle this problem of too much information with good odds of success.

Foolish Consistency and Hobgoblins

More importantly however, is the value of enriching our understanding of the guidelines and studies we read. Many writers (with whom I don't really agree, but I see where they’re coming from) have identified an unpleasant trend in accessibility and usability - and slavishly adhering to guidelines such that content suffers.

By recognizing the basic psychology behind the guidelines, we can without needing a pocket rule book, and we're better equipped to explain those decisions to our friends, bosses, and colleagues.

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authorUrl: http://www.cactusflower.org/some-historical-usability-research
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