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Archive for January, 2005

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An Accessibility Primer

This is a helpful starting point for developing for Web accessibility.

Accessibility from the Ground Up.

Yes, Web accessibility is growing up. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 was released over five years ago, in May 1999. This year, the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative will release Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. WCAG is the international standard for Web accessibility, and the latest version contains plenty of guidance on how to produce modern, usable, and (dare I say it?) attractive Web sites

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Posted January 26th, 2005 in External Link by Matt

Free PHP RSS Aggregation Script

Free PHP RSS Agregation Script from FeedForAll. A nice little gadget that will come in handy at some point.

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Posted January 19th, 2005 in External Link by Matt

Intuitive Web Design

Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering has some interesting commentary on What makes a design seem intuitive.

knowledge-brick-3.gif

The distance between current knowledge and target knowledge has a technical name: “The Gap”. (Subsequently, an entire chain of clothing stores was named after it!) The Knowledge Gap is where design happens. We don’t need to design to the left of current knowledge point, because it’s all stuff the user already knows. And we don’t need to design stuff to the right of the target knowledge point, since the user won’t be needing that information (for this task, at least). We only need to design the interface for the space in between current knowledge and target knowledge. (See a picture of the Knowledge Gap here: )

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Posted January 19th, 2005 in Web Design by Matt

RSS Copyright can of worms

Scobel has compiled a nice list of arguments about RSS copyright issues.

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Posted January 19th, 2005 in External Link by Matt

Accessibility Testing: Screen Readers

The U.S. National Cancer Institute recently did a user study of screen reader users.

The Communication Technologies Branch of the United States National Cancer Institute (part of National Institutes of Health and Department of Health and Human Services) has been conducting usability testing with people with disabilities, specifically blind and lowvision users, to * understand the relationship between accessibility and usability * understand how blind and low-vision users work with Web sites * develop research-based guidelines for accessibility and usability * assess the usability of specific Web sites for blind and low-vision users

It looks like they studied 16 users. Which makes the findings non-scientific, but still helpful (same as with Eyetrack III.

They had about 16 findings as well. All pretty interesting. Check out the article to get more detail about each.

  1. Screen-reader users scan with their ears.
  2. Screen-reader users must understand the browser, the screen reader, and the Web sites - quite a mental load.
  3. Many users do not know or use all the features of the software.
  4. The software does an amazing job but still mispronounces words.
  5. Many screen-reader users do not want a special version (”text version”).
  6. Many want to skip the navigation but do not do so.
  7. Many users jump from link to link or use a Links List box.
  8. The Find feature does not cycle through the page - and the screen reader moves the cursor as it talks.
  9. When the ALT-tag and the text on a page differ, users may type the wrong information in the Find dialogue box
  10. Some users are poor spellers, which makes searching difficult.
  11. Anchor links can work well, but not if the page refreshes.
  12. Some screen-reader users jump from heading to heading.
  13. First, screen-reader users must find the form.
  14. Users do not want to switch back and forth between text and fields.
  15. If screen-reader users are in form-filling (Edit) mode, they do not hear any text that is not part of a field.
  16. When filling out a field makes the page refresh, the software starts reading from the top as if it were a new page.

They had an interesting quote in their conclusion:

Richard Rubenstein and Harry Hersh said some years ago about software development [7, p. 29]:
In the absence of detailed information, we all work from assumptions about who the user is, what he or she does, and what type of system would meet his or her needs. Following these assumptions, we tend to design for ourselves, not for other people.

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Posted January 19th, 2005 in Web Design by Matt

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