Web Site Accessibility Blog

The following is an interview with Chris Hofstader. Chris is the former VP at Freedom Scientific and is now actively blogging and enjoying life. Chris’ interview helped to form a lot of the backbone of the article and helped me to understand how an advanced user can use the internet and search engines. Because each of the people I interviewed were so interesting, and they each had their own stories, I thought it best to post some of their interviews for us all to appreciate and learn.
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mb: How long have you been using the internet?

cdh: Since the days before www. Long enough ago to remember when emacs was the best interface to SMTP, NNTP and the little chat programs we used back then. Way before Mosaic or all of these pictures.

mb:What is your search engine preference?

cdh: Depending upon what I am looking for, I usually go to google first but I very much like ask.com and some of the search pages designed for hackers when I need to find a technical tid bit in a hurry. For all “normal” things, it’s google, scholar.google or ask.com.

mb: Is there an accessibility-based reason for that?

cdh: Not really. I’m a power user plus when it comes to JAWS so, no matter what search engine I’m running, I tend to use the JAWS “Virtual Find” function and other tricks to navigate a page quickly. Even really busy pages like ebay and emusic can be tamed very quickly and be accessible to me with a little ingenuity and JAWS features.

Unfortunately, most users don’t know about or care to invest the time in learning how to access such things quickly so struggle with “accessibility.” I think, on search engines, the greatest accessibility problems are no longer issues that can be corrected with the WAI or 508 guidelines but, rather, are design principles for usability. What is “usable” to people with varying levels of vision impairment has hardly been studied and those of us interested in doing so are few and far between so, in my opinion, moving from “accessible” to “usable” will take another decade.

mb: Which engines are more accessible than others, in your opinion?

Some of the oddball hacker ones are pretty inaccessible because nobody stopped to label anything. Otherwise, google and ask both do a decent job and I get where I’m going pretty quickly.

mb: Have search engines ever been an obstacle for you? How so?

Yes. Prior to MSN’s change, it was pretty nasty. Yahoo is too noisy to navigate results efficiently. Google has always been pretty good except for the Turing test thing. I used to like Alta Vista but haven’t looked at it in years. I don’t know a whole lot about others as I don’t even try them.

mb: What things do you do to make search engines easier to use for you?

I use lots of JAWS features for IE. Specifically, I use the QuickKeys, Placemarkers and Virtual Find to move about the pages very quickly. Different strategies work better on some pages than others. Also, I’m pretty good at making logical statements for advanced searches so I tend to get a pretty good hit rate on what I search for. Finally, I have things I search for often stored as favorites, using the facilities for such provided by search engines.

mb: Have they improved in the past few years?

Yes. Ask, google and Yahoo have all improved vis a vis WAI guidelines and such.

mb: Anything else? I know you have some strong opinions . . .

Oh, this is kind of boring. multi-media content can be annoying and, no matter what Bob Regan says, Flash is an accessibility nightmare but I just turn all of that stuff off.

Of course, I search for such geeky stuff that I don’t run into too many multi-media pages. Maybe if I cared at all about POP culture, I might be less of an outlier on such studies. The majority of the stuff I look at is best expressed as text or audio anyway as pictures and such distract from the overt nerdiness of it all.