Raising the awareness of Web Site Accessibility and Marketing.
Webcredible got some press recently with their survey of UK retailer websites. According to their study, 35% of retailers fail to meet the Disability Discrimination Act. In disabled access tests, the average score was 57%, but H Samuel topped the list with a 76% accessibility rating.
Webcredible offers the the details of this December 2007 report as a PDF, “Accessibility for Ecommerce High Street Retailers 2007“, free with email registration.
Target loses an appeal of the class action status of the Lawsuit brought by the National Federation of the Blind. Target had appealed the class-action status of the suit to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The petition was denied and the lawsuit will proceed “on behalf of all Americans.”
This seems to be some of the last challenges to the suite that Target has brought. The actual case has yet to begin, as Target has challenged many of the aspects of the case, the class-action status being the latest. It should be interesting to see when a court date is set, or if this will even get to court.
ON a related note, the NFB and Amazon.com announced that Amazon.com will be accessible to blind users by June 30, 2008.
Source: NFB Press Release
Hattip to Joe Clark.
The Target v NFB lawsuit seems to be cruising to the netherworld of settlement. Meaning that it will be even longer until there is substantial (or intelligent) legislation or precedent establishing the responsibility of companies in developing an accessible presence online. Who would have thought it would take legal action to make a site easier to use and accessible, thereby increasing the potential reach to customers?
Joe Clark posted extensively about the agreement reach between Amazon.com and the NFB. I can’t begin to recount his excellent survey of the situation, so I’ll only “stand on his shoulders” and deliver some of the highlights.
Good questions.
What an amazing opportunity to create a fully CSS compliant site that will be fully accessible and interoperable, regardless of device. I could use Amazon.com on my mobile phone or any other device besides a browser if that were possible. When will these companies realize the business case for accessibility? The more people that can access your site, the more potential customers you will have. Especially as mobile browsing increases, interoperability and degrading gracefully will be critical to success.
Accessibility, in the most liberal definition of the word, is just smart business.
I had the privilege of attending accessibility testing for an enterprise-level software application and found some interesting issues that are not typical to many projects. Actual user testing is strange like that – dealing with humans brings out all of the random factors.
First Issue: User Interaction with JAWS
One of the testers was a diabetic. She was blind and used Jaws, she also suffered from carpel-tunnel-like symptoms, called trigger finger. The tendons in her hands were shortening and becoming increasingly inflexible, which happens to many diabetics. Her hands were scarred from multiple surgeries on those tendons. The issue I observed was that some of the keystrokes combinations were very difficult for her to perform. Certain hand movements were difficult, slightly painful, but it was a surprise to find an unintended consequence to key combinations.
This became more of a JAWS issue for her navigation. She relied on simple keystroke commands, but the application required her to use some complex commands, which were difficult. This became a case of evaluating the controls and how it could be made easier for accommodation.
Second Issue: JAWS familiarity
Most accessibility issues could be overcome by improving the level of JAWS familiarity. Many JAWS users have a basic level of JAWS interaction, enough to get them where they want to go. However, this application will require specific JAWS training for internal employees. There are many functions in the application that are much easier to manage with a high level of JAWS expertise. We found that most JAWS users have the necessary understanding for navigating documents and the web, but they like learning new methods of improving their experience.
The advanced JAWS users were more able to cope with troubleshooting, navigating new and unfamiliar applications, pages, and accomplishing the specific testing goals. The added familiarity supplemented their toolset of resources in dealing with unfamiliar web pages. The accessibility of any system improves with the level of knowledge of the JAWS user.
Third issue: Usability v Accessibility
The developers of this software application tested many methods of improving accessibility. Each option was tested and evaluated. However, in the actual user testing the JAWS users expected certain behaviors, such as error handling, which were typical of using the web in combination with Internet Explorer and JAWS. When those specific events were improved in the application, the users were not pleased with the different behavior. Even though the application was more accessible, the users did not expect the more accessible behavior. They were used to overcoming the obstacles of poor accessibility and expected that behavior. Because they expected something different, they were not prepared for the more accessible method, and some actually preferred the less-accessible behaviors.
This is one case where expectancy, a key component of usability, affected the judgment of users in using a new system. The developers now had a dilemma of keeping the more accessible code, which improved many functions, or to change the code back to the typical less-accessible counterpart, simply because users were used to the issues that they typically cope with.
Fourth Issue: Vendor Claims
Here is where I can rant for days. Software applications that claim to be “accessible” but really aren’t. And usually, there isn’t even a good case that could be made for the “accessible” claim. Because a screen reader can toss out a few works? How can you describe your product as accessible when you don’t even use proper markup of page elements, frames, and critical navigation items?
As an example, this software produces reports that are navigated across multiple frames. The frameset lacks any <noframe> descriptions, so the user only has the title of each frame, which is barely descriptive. The main navigation is a tree structure that has no labels or descriptions, and the only method to expand the tree navigation is mouse-dependant. The navigation labels in the actual report lacked any sort of descriptive text. “Void” was the label for the print function. Many other labels were non-existed, misleading or simply absent.
This is accessible? How can you possible claim to be an accessible product when your application does not even take the simplest steps for accessible mark-up?
This last issue was the one that made me the angriest. The vendor of this application is seemingly unimpressed with the customer’s repeated requests for an actual accessible product. They simply seem to shrug their shoulders and claim that it is “accessible” when it is clearly unacceptable. It makes me wonder how this claim can be made and if there are any laws being broken. I am also sure that many vendors make the claim of being accessible without even understanding what accessible means, much less having the user testing to back it up.
What I learned
Even the best programming cannot account for human accessibility and usability testing. testing is critical to developing any site or application, as there will be many factors that were simply not considered, but will increase the effectiveness of the end product. My favorite part of the testing was the interaction and conversations with each of the testers. I enjoyed getting to know them, their stories, and their opinions about website accessibility. I feel as though I learned more from these amazing people than any book could have contained.
The following is another interview that I did with Lee Laughlin. Lee is the owner of Fearless Events, an event planning service. I met Lee when I was speaking at a seminar and we immediately became friends. I have learned a great deal about accessibility simply through our conversations together.
Lee has albinism, a condition of low pigmentation, which also affects vision. Just as the lack of pigment in the skin, the lack of pigment reduces the number of “cones” in the retina. You haven’t lived until you’ve ridden in a car with her and her telescope glasses. Lee was a fascinating choice for this article series, as I believe that most of us understand blindness to a degree, but most do not understand or even grasp how extensive low-vision affects people and websites. In many of the accessibility consulting jobs that I have done, low vision is always overlooked as art of the project.
This is a shame, as it affects more than the elderly, as some would claim. This affects one of the fastest growing segments of the American population, the baby boomers. It also affects countless other people because of other conditions such as albinism, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and many others.
I hope you learn from this interview, as I have learned from Lee as well.
MB: How long have you been using the internet?
LL: Since 1994
MB: What is your preference of search engine?
LL: Google
MB: Which engines are more accessible than others, in your opinion?
LL: I like Big.com if I have a headache or am suffering from eye strain.
I typically stick with Google because of the uncluttered interface. Everything else is too cluttered.
MB: Have search engines been an obstacle for you? How so?
LL: No, just the opposite, a boon. Growing up, there were many things that I had difficulty reading (e.g. phone books). The Internet has opened up a whole knew world for me and search engines have helped me organize it.
MB: What is the best color combination/contrast for you to be able to see pages the best?
LL: I prefer a black background with yellow or white text
MB: Has search improved in the past few years?
LL: Yes and no. I think the results you get are much more accurate and relevant, but some SE’s insist of Feature overload.
MB: What assistive technology do you use?
LL: Apple’s built in screen enlarging software.
MB: Do they help or hinder your use of search engines?
LL: It reduces the field of view, so an uncluttered interface is critical.
MB: What are specific things you would like to see improved in search queries, results, and services?
LL: I’d love to see the ability to store interface preferences in a cookie. I want to go to Google and automatically have it show up as light text on a dark background. I can do it through the OS, but in many applications, it is a hinderance. So If Google would let me do it, that would be great.
MB: Have you tried the Google Accessibility search at labs.google.com/accessibility? If so, what are your thoughts about this beta search service?
LL: I just looked at it. I suspect if I used a screen reader it might be useful.
MB: How can I best describe to others what you “see”?
LL: Simple answer, a lack of detail at a distance. Detailed answer, http://www.albinism.org/publications/What-We-See.html
MB: Can you tell me a little bit about albinism and how it affects your vision?
LL: I have a difficulty seeing details at a distance. I also have problems reading small print and light and glare are an issue as well. I have nystagmus (an uncontrollable and irregular motion of the eyes). The world doesn’t move, but my brain has to work harder to provide a stable image. Eye fatigue is can be an issue. Compared to most people with albinism, I have fairly good vision and am able to get by with minor modifications.
MB: You are obviously tied into the albinism community – what kind of support is available, and how does news of new features disseminate to the end user?
LL: Well, truth be told, in this case, we’d align more with the Low Vision or Blind Community and hope for trickle down from them.
MB: What resources does the average user in the albinism community have available to learn of new features or find assistance?
LL:Depends on how technically savvy they are. Newsletters, organizational memberships (i.e. American Council for the Blind or National Federation of the Blind). It they are still “in the system”, meaning they are connected to an agency that serves the blind or visually impaired, they might get the info from a rehabilitation counsellor or agency newsletter.
MB: You had said that you just went to the accessible search, but had you heard about it prior?
LL: Nope.
MB: Do search engines or sites do a good job of notifying people of their new features?
LL: NO!
MB: Do any web-based businesses or technologies communicate to the National Albinism community or leadership for guidance or assistance in order to make their products or user experience better?
LL:No, not with us, but they might with American Council for the Blind (Nat’l Federation for the blind is a little more militant, so my guess is people would avoid them). You could also post to the Albinism Online Community.
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.
- - -
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.
This is part one of an interview series that I had performed this fall while researching for an article. The article ended up being much too large for publication, so I have decided to publish the interviews and the full text of the article here at Accessibility Blog.
Part one is the interview with T.V. Raman, who was instrumental in creating the Accessible Search interface at Google.
How was the idea for the accessible search received?
Working on Accessible Search has been a very positive experience for everyone involved. From the start, within Google, the idea of Accessible Search was received as a useful tool and an important first step. Interestingly, although there was a lot of feedback from the accessibility community as to how Google could improve accessibility to some of our services, the actual idea of Accessible Search as a tool to help find accessible content wasn’t necessarily on top of anyone’s list. However, from our perspective, we thought that offering new search functionality built on what we already have in place, was the fastest and best route to helping users discover pages that would be most useful to them.
I think our instinct was right because Accessible Search has been a very positive experience from the start and continues to be so. That goes from building it to seeing the initial positive reaction from the user community and continuing to improve the product to date. I hope that as we continue to improve Accessible Search, we’ll have a long-term positive impact on increasing awareness of the need to create clean, accessible Web content.
It seems as though you are taking into account some of the elements of standards-based programming in the algorithm. Are standards anything of concern at Google? Do you find that sites written according to W3C standards are more relevant in general?
For accessibility, clean, well-structured semantic markup is the best thing you could hope to have. The three key phrases “clean” “well-structured” and “semantic” are all important in the above. Adherence to specs definitely makes checking easier. However, I do not believe that passing a checker that validates ones markup for structure is a sufficient condition to verify accessibility. I can easily create XHTML documents that will pass every static checker but may potentially end up not being accessible, i.e. any one measure is very easy to game. That being said, I believe that Web sites creating clean, well-formed XHTML content will, over time, find it significantly easier to serve all their users better — simply because their content will be easier to manage and evolve.
Do you have ways of distinguishing appropriate and inappropriate ALT attributes?
Google scores ALT attributes appropriately, and things like stuffing a 14-page essay into an ALT tag won’t help you rank better and will annoy your users. We encourage users to use ALT and TITLE tags in the best way for users, and that work well for Google as well.”
In general, what issues does Google believe it can authoritatively decide are “accessible” - given that only the validation of code and absence of deprecated features can be fully tested automatically?
I believe our “abilities” in the above are likely to be a moving target. I think of it as being analogous to our ability to detecting email spam. Also, keep in mind that we’re still soliciting feedback from the user community and evolving it further, which is why it was launched in Google Labs.
How has the accessible search been received by blind users?
So far, its reception has been very positive. There’s been some criticism in the blogosphere saying “this isn’t needed, sites should just follow access standards” but end-users who are struggling with the mess we have on the Web today definitely appear to find this a useful tool and that’s our goal.
Is Google working with the blind community to make them aware of the Accessible Search?
We’ve announced it on many of the blindness related lists and have spent time briefing some of the journalists that cover this topic. In general, the blind/visually impaired user community in the U.S. is very well connected, in that users become aware of services fairly quickly. If it’s useful, word gets around quickly. We’ve relied on word-of-mouth, just like we do for so many of our product launches, which is a testament to our usability.
Many low-vision users weren’t impressed, as the tagline said for the visually impaired, but wasn’t any better than the usual search. Are there plans to expand the accessible search for all vision types?
Let’s separate the tagline from actual user experience. We got a lot of flak from different users just on word choice e.g. “visually impaired” vs. “visually disabled” vs. “visually challenged” vs. …and, personally, I believe it’s impossible to come up with a catch phrase that covers everyone, makes everyone happy and at the same time conveys the entire gamut of the user population and the exact meaning of the product.
As for search results with Accessible Search, our intention for this Google Labs experiment was to see if we could reorder results based on accessibility. It seems that many users just saw the name “Accessible Search” — and then went to the results page expecting an entirely different layout of results. When they didn’t see something entirely different, then went away thinking it saying “it just looks the same.”
Since more than one person had this experience, our take away is that we need to get better at communicating what Accessible Search is really all about. We get better when we know what works for the user and welcome user feedback on everything from improving taglines to adding new features.
Are there more plans for Google to become more accessible?
Building Accessible Search is a good first step in delivering the most accessible information online and we hope to continue developing ways that Google can be more accessible.
Are you working on additional accessibility projects?
While we don’t talk about specific products before they launch, I’ve been thinking about a few projects in this area.
Can you give us a little history about yourself?
Absoutely. http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman
Dr. T.V. Raman posted to the Official Google Blog yesterday, explaining audio CAPTCHA’s and Google’s policy. While explaining the need to be accessible, he also asks for user feedback on the current methods being used by Google. (A trademark action by Google - getting user feedback)
Here’s your chance to let your voice be heard. Help Dr. Raman improve the accessibility at Google!
Last week, I posted an article from WebCredible about the future of accessibility. Trenton Moss initiated a good start to a conversation that needs to happen in the accessibility and developer community about the co-existence of rich media, social media, and accessibility.
Interestingly, Alastair Campbell, on his blog, AlastairC, finds the post here on Accessibility blog and adds a significant amount of comments and opinion about it. As such, I feel as though I have to give his post notice, as it provides an interesting contrast to Trenton’s article. Alastair feels that there can be compatibility between rich media and accessbility, and provides many excellent examples of these applications.
Here are Alastair’s comments on seperate sites, but please go read the entire article:
Will separate sites be needed?
I don’t believe so. However, there is a compromise needed whilst we are waiting for screen readers to catch up. A Hijax application will work as a standard site when JavaScript is turned off. The problem is that screen reader users are generally on Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari, which have JavaScript.
Therefore there should be an option built into the application to easily allow people to effectively turn off JavaScript (i.e. an option on the site, not telling people to turn off JavaScript in their browser!).
from Blind Access Journal
Following many other sites as they realize that visual-only tests are not acceptable, eBay has instituted an audio CAPTCHA. Although it has not been confirmed, this is a positive step by one of the internet’s largest commercial sites.
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