I like accessibility. It’s taking some time to learn and there’s a lot to remember to do. Much of the documentation and standards for laws and guidelines are hard to understand. However, it’s well worth it and for some types of web sites and in some countries, meeting accessibility standards is the law.

In my work testing sites, I can tell that most developers still miss the basics, like alt and link attributes, contrasts, text alternatives to scripts and plug ins…to name a few. I found myself agreeing with Helping others understand web accessibility and decided to ask others for their opinions on whether or not implementing accessibility standards is difficult.

I asked “What do you think prevents mass adoption of good accessibility implementation? What prevents you from learning it in greater detail?”

Some of their replies:

After ignorance comes laziness in second place. Considering the vast number of sites that don’t scale text, or have strong contrast in fore/background colours etc., it’s not a suprise that a large number of sites aren’t very friendly to certain user-types. Some people simply do not stop and think, let alone test.

The answer, my friends, is that most developers do not actually understand what they are doing.

They learn something and that is their tool and approach from then on out. Being able to build in Dreamweaver or Wordpress, to create in Photoshop, to add-on osCommerce, etc. is being able to utilise extremely useful applications BUT how many of those same people can hand tweak them? Actually know what those scripts and code mean and do?

Accessibility doesn’t ring a bell, because:
- people think it is related to handicapped people only
- there’s no obvious direct connection between accessible coding and good results
- it is branded as “accessibility” in terms of “do it for the 15% and for the law”, not “to earn 15%+ more money”.

I have to say that at a fundamental level, web accessibility is very easy. As the complexity of the site grows, so do the accessibility issues, but when you take a relatively simple example site, making it accessible is simply not all that challenging.

However, it does require attention to detail, compassion, and understanding.

But I’m guessing that most of the problem is that most websites do not have a good webmaster/project manager who is the key to getting all the parts of the puzzle (programming, marketing, branding, design, information) together.

Nice related post by Lorelle today - Blog Challenge: Testing Your Blog’s Accessibility

She writes:

There is a growing number of bloggers and blog readers who are reading your blog right now with a screen reader which reads your blog to them, or some other magnification or screen customization tool or device that enables the visually or physically impaired to read and communicate with their computers and the web.

Have you tested your blog’s design for web standards for accessibility?

Every day another light bulb goes off in someone’s head when they wake up and realize that what they’ve been doing isn’t enough to count.

Once, when I watched SiteLogic’s Matt Bailey present to a search engine marketing conference audience what their optimized web pages sounded like to people who relied on Assistive technology to use the Web, I could feel the entire room change. He’d made his point. Poor SEO techniques could make web site pages completely unusable for people.

His presentation was about how to fix that problem.

I’m not sure where my friends’ passion for accessibility or usability comes from. I don’t know what hooked me either.

Joe Dolson is wrapped up in accessible design practices and when he writes in his blog or in the Usability/Accessibility forum at Cre8asiteforums, it’s clear he deeply cares about the end user experience. I don’t know why it matters to him, but we need people like him to keep teaching and reminding us what matters most.

My friend Elizabeth Able has intimate knowledge of the needs of disabled web users, and not just because her mother runs a school for the blind. Liz’s personal experiences and born intuitive insight make her a perfect advocate as a self employed web designer.

Today’s UPA Journal presents an article called, What is our role as Usability Professionals, by Silvia Zimmermann. She writes,

As Usability people we usually tend to focus on making things easier to use. To allow for good usability and an excellent user experience we integrate user centered design methods and standardized usability processes into our daily work. We are used to doing this; we advocate for it day after day; we even try to persuade our clients and the people around us to do the same because we have a strong belief in it. And without question, making things easier to use is an honorable thing to do, because it generally enhances the overall user experience.

It bothers me when I hear stories from software development companies who don’t have a usability specialist on hand or do user testing. There are other companies that budget in usability and accessibility but it’s all smoke and mirrors. They don’t actually implement the changes. Rather, it looks good to document that they tested a few things and called it a day.

I’m noticing more articles and blog posts from people who are becoming interested in how usable web design is the logical next step in marketing. It’s a bit of putting the cart before the horse, however.

When you build something to be accessed via the Internet, plan on optimizing for search engines and people at the same time.

Search engines don’t need your consideration as much as your family, friends and customers do.

I’m surrounded nearly every day with discussions both on and off line that cover Internet software and web site development. It’s part of my job to know what frustrates people. Sometimes the user experience is so pathetically bad that all you can do is try to grin and bear the ordeal and hope that someday, somebody, gets with the program.

Take EasyPass, for example. In the State I live in, some roads are not free to drive on. There are toll roads, which require that money be collected from everyone who drives the road. Bridges operate in the same way. On holidays, busy weekends and during rush hours when people are coming and going from work, toll booths get backed up with cars waiting to pay their fee.

Hence, some States in the USA offer a way to zip on through electronically with a gadget you attach to your automobile that’s scanned as you whiz on through the fast lanes of the toll booths designed for easier passing through. Your credit card is billed the amount for the toll.

It’s a nifty little device and comes in really handy on long trips or for commuters. My husband had one, since he uses a toll road to get to work. When we’d go on vacations, we’d grab the EasyPass device from his car and stick it on the motor home, so we could sail on through any toll booths that had an EasyPass lane.

You can order the device online. But as Eric learned, if you lose your device, you enter something resembling La La Land if you try to replace it.

Not long ago he went online to use the form that he hoped would let him replace the lost EasyPass device and also order two more. We’re traveling soon and taking another car along with the motor home. We’ll need a device for each car. He fiddled with the online application and told me in passing one day that we were all set. The devices would arrive in time for our trip. It was one less thing I would need to worry about.

On Saturday he got a letter in the mail telling him the State couldn’t assist him because he already had an account. So? We just stared at one another. Because he has an account, he can’t get a replacement device or order additional ones? Why did he get a form letter in the mail? He used the Internet for the transaction. Why did the software not let him know of any problem while he was there? The letter said if he had any questions, to please call. He wasn’t encouraged to seek help online and no email contact was made. It was all snail mail communication, although his contact and supposed transaction was made online.

There was no confirmation of his supposed transaction other than it wasn’t going to happen within our lifetimes without a fight. Eric uses his cell phone for calls, as well as it’s an appendage to his body. He uses it to remember every detail of every second of the day. I swear it’s glued to his hands. So when the letter said to call a number that looked like this: 234-iam-nohelp (in other words, it was a combination of numbers and letter) he ranted about how much of a pain it is to dial phone numbers like that with a mobile device.

He finally accomplished that task only to get the robotic voice directing him to the many options available. When he made his way to the right department, they still wouldn’t let him talk to a human until he had his account number ready.

Which of course, was not on the letter they mailed him. He was standing in the middle of the driveway, outside the house, nowhere near a computer that could have gotten him to their software application that may, or may not, have had the account number somewhere on it. The letter didn’t supply any warning that an account number would be needed for the phone call.

One of the few perks of being married to a SQA Performance Engineer is moments like this when he wants to scream to the high heavens about poor usability and I get more insight into user behavior, for free.

How can a government agency have done so poorly? Clearly, the online application isn’t working properly or wasn’t user tested. Eric says he can’t go in and edit anything except possibly changing his credit card information. He seems to be unable to order more devices or replace a missing one. He can’t talk to a human being without having the secret word. He’s heard there are ways to get devices in stores, which might be fine, but why bother to have a web site application then?

I have no idea the outcome of all this. He’s got it in his head that he figure this all out. Between me and you though, I have a feeling we’ll be slowing down at toll booths on our trip and cursing software development processes that aren’t usable or accessible to people because that’s what user oriented design people always do while on vacation. Right?

In Other News

On accessibility, Joe Dolson has some feedback on a recent article on e-commerce accessibility.

Richard Sedley’s What is your most powerful persuasive page on your website is a perfect podcast for persuasion designers. Did you know it takes 500 milliseconds to decide if something is credible or not? It covers “snap judgments”, momentum, conversions, human behavior, requirements based decisions and a great deal more, in a lively presentation. It fits in well with the book I’m reading now called “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point”, which I also read. He also gets into influence and motivations people have.

One example is an experiment about how people looking up into the sky motivates others to do the same. This reminds me of an incident back when I was dating a student from Lehigh University.

A small group of us were walking up the “The Hill” one night, heading for yet another frat party. One of the other girlfriends of the guys had the idea for a way to annoy the people driving the winding road on campus that circled around the frat houses on the side of South Mountain, rather than walking, which was the tradition.

She suddenly stopped, stooped low to the ground and started yelling, “My contact, my contact! I can’t find my contact lens!” One by one, those in our group played along to get the gig going. I think I had too much beer because I could only bear to stand to the side laughing hysterically as I watched more and more people come running over to help look for the “missing contact”. A car pulled up, and the driver was asked to shine his headlights closer so everyone could see better. The girl did one of the best acting jobs I’d ever seen, as she expressed her distressed state at losing the tiny contact lens.

Within a few short minutes, people gave up because there was no resolution to this experience. They backed off or walked away. The driver got angry because there was a line of cars now behind him honking. The whole thing took less than a few minutes but it forever imprinted on me how easy it is to influence people into doing something.

Congratulations to one of the my students, Miriam Ellis, who won educational scholarship money from Cre8asiteforums. She completed my online usability course at SearchEngineCollege, as well as other courses to complete Pathway A: Certified Search Engine Optimizer. Usability is an elective for the certification path and I was pleased Miriam chose to add it to her search marketing course list.

Lastly, I visited Commerce 360 today to have lunch with my friends, Bill Slawski (my co-Admin at Cre8asiteforums) and Liana Evans. I got to meet some more folks at Commerce 360, as well as prove to myself that Bill really does work there now. Lunch was fantastic. They asked if I’m going to SES San Jose in August.

No plans yet. But I can bribed.

As an occasional Search Engine Strategies Conference Reporter for SearchEngineRoundTable , I can choose the topics I want to cover. I purposely combine topics I know something about, such as SEO and Usability, with areas I have no skills or knowledge about. This keeps me learning while I’m working.

In New York last April, I chose AJAX and SEO because it was new to me. Far too new, frankly. I did my best to cover CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines for the blog, but didn’t do it justice. Much of that could be attributed to what I later realized was a presentation designed for attendees who are already developing with AJAX.

Fortunately I came away from that session intrigued and have kept my eyes out for good sources of information someone at my level might understand.

Rich McIver, from SoftwareDeveloper.com, came through by sending me a heads up for How to: Get Google and AJAX to Play Nice: The best ways to incorporate the benefits of AJAX without making your site blind to search engines.

From the first page:

AJAX allows you to incorporate a lot of innovative site design characteristics. Some designers take the AJAX craze too far, however, by incorporating AJAX to a degree that it hurts their site’s usability and accessibility.

As I read along, I had in mind the recent discussions at Cre8asiteforums on WCAG Samurai Errata for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0.

Now, I have even more questions related to AJAX and Accessibility.

The article provides brief information on sitemaps, noscript, Hijax and links to White Papers on the topic for further help.

As much reading, research, testing and study on all things user centered design, usability and accessibility that I do, what always sticks and leaves a lasting impression on me is when I watch someone try to use a web site application. The experience is unique to each individual. Some incidents leave a lasting impression on me.

It happened again a few days ago when I was visiting my 70 year old parents. My father, a retired electronics engineer and computer programmer from its early days, went to Google Maps because he offered to find directions for somewhere I needed to go for a business meeting later that day. He had a devil of a time with the application.

I wasn’t sure if it was due to age. He’s in top form, a runner in excellent health, and is far smarter than I am. He has no disabilities other than recent cataracts surgery, which only served to improve his eyesight. His mind is clear and motor skills excellent. And yet as I watched, he tried to make the map do things it wasn’t ready to do because he hadn’t given it enough information first. He thought he could bypass some steps and when it didn’t respond as expected, the software just stopped being usable for him.

I wanted to ask what was confusing as he used it but I fell into a little testing role, where I didn’t want to add any suggestions or ask questions about the steps he took. I just watched. I would have entered a start and end address from the start, but he was confident he only needed the address of the business and the map itself would give him what he wanted to know. He didn’t want directions in text. He wanted to refresh his memory of the geography of the area that he knows so well, and then he would know for sure, in his mind, how to get me there without needing Google’s directions.

He couldn’t get the actual map to work. One click led to something confusing to him and it was downhill from there, until he slowed down and accepted the limitations of the application that had a mind of its own. It could only do what it was programmed to do. It wasn’t programmed for a stubborn visitor who had his own way of using it.

An article called
UK usability market to grow 20% in 2007 - new report caught my eye. My first thought was that 20% is far too low. It states that competition is driving an interest in investing in usability and accessibility.

What a shame it has to be about money or branding.

I get my passion for usability by watching people struggle with web sites. What kind of company builds a web site or application and doesn’t conduct user testing? All kinds. Those that do look for target market users who fit a known set of criteria the site is designed to be used by. Thing is, this is the Internet.

Just when you think you designed and launched a web site or application that you believe is an absolute no-brainer to use, someone comes along who makes it do something different. You likely won’t know where they are or when they’ll appear. Abandoned pages won’t tell the story. They’ll just point to signs of trouble.

I couldn’t help but wonder what a Google developer would think, watching my senior citizen father use their map application. I wondered how many senior citizens they brought it to test it. With so many developers obviously below retirement age, how many are considering the needs of older people who use the Internet?

Money isn’t the only incentive for usable design.

Sometimes it’s the desire to make things work for people who depend on us to make things work for them.