Slide 1: CIC IT Accessibility and Usability Working Group Annual Summer Conference The importance of accessibility and usability now and in the future Howard Rosenbaum hrosenba@indiana.edu Slide 2: Accessibility and usability now and in the future I. Introduction: accessibility and usability Accessibility standards arent working Usability practice is lagging behind II. Trends Movement towards ubiquity Design is moving towards the edges An accessibility dilemma at the production end III. Possibilities Holistic accessibility and usability Slide 3: I. Introduction: accessibility and usability Our motivation: a significant population of people with various disabilities use the web 51.2 million people (18%) have some level of disability 4 million children (11%) 6 to 14 have a disability 72% of people > 80 have disabilities, the highest of any age group 36% of people 15-64 with a severe disability use a computer and 29% use the net at home, respectively For those without a disability: 61% and 51% http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/010102.html Slide 4: I. Introduction: accessibility and usability Typical disabilities include Blindness Low or limited vision Color blindness Deafness or hearing impairment Physical or motor impairments Cognitive disorders Neurological disorders Slide 5: I. Introduction: accessibility and usability The web is increasingly important in many aspects of life: education, employment, government, commerce, health care, recreation, and more The web must be accessible to provide equal access and opportunity to people with disabilities Accessibility barriers to print, audio, and visual media can be overcome through web technologies It is becoming more important to ensure that ICTs are accessible to and usable by all This involves social, technical, financial, and policy factors http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/accessibility.php Slide 6: I. Introduction: accessibility and usability Problem: there is a need for a more holistic approach to help disabled people to access digital information, services and experiences Low levels of usability and accessibility for them indicates a focus on the adoption of guidelines by content authors, tool developers and policy makers is not sufficient for an inclusive web It is important to see the web from the disabled persons perspective Complicating factors: available browsing and assistive technologies, their ability to use them, and the difference between what is available and what they need Slide 7: I. Introduction: accessibility and usability The meanings of accessibility and usability are contested as the relationship between them What they share is a goal of making ICTs available to the widest possible audiences Usability is a powerful tool for improving accessibility Assumption: there is a growing recognition that users with disabilities have the same right as others to access information with ICTs Particularly for people with disabilities, web access is an important goal and challenging problem for web content developers and designers Slide 8: I. Introduction: accessibility and usability There are good business reasons as well People with disabilities tend to be loyal when they find a responsive business or other organization This is a market of ~54 million with discretionary income of ~175 billion An accessible web site is very similar to an accessible building. An accessible building offers curb cuts, ramps, and elevators to allow a person with disabilities to enter and navigate through the building with ease. An accessible web site offers similar functionality. Lazar, J, et.al. (2003). Improving web accessibility: a study of webmaster perceptions. Computers in Human Behavior. www.apa.org/divisions/div21/MemberActivities/chb2004/jl.pdf Slide 9: Accessibility and usability now and in the future I. Introduction: accessibility and usability Accessibility standards arent working Usability practice is lagging behind II. Trends Movement towards ubiquity Design is moving towards the edges An accessibility dilemma at the production end III. Possibilities Holistic accessibility and usability Slide 10: II. Trends Movement towards ubiquity ICTs are increasingly networked, collaborative, interwoven, and interdependent Usability and accessibility methods were developed to evaluate stand-alone systems or individual devices They are inadequate for this new networked context Testing networked applications is vastly different from testing a standalone product Lab testing isnt meaningful for most current products To be relevant, the testing must be mobile, modular, and contextual (this cant be done in a lab) Slide 11: II. Trends Computing has become pervasive: ICTs and applications are converging They are used in a variety of environments, scenarios, and contexts Problem: most contexts of use today, however, live in the long tail The increasing mobility and ubiquity of devices makes predicting the context of use, and thus usability and accessibility, more difficult We need methods that can anticipate and account for unexpected and continuously changing contexts of use Slide 12: II. Trends The product development cycle has changed: there is a rush to market Cycle time has been shortened dramatically - the early design and development phase still exists but the deployment phase is essentially zero The people who purchase and using the ICTs are the beta testers Deployment begins to trump testing, and upgrades begin to overrule design With short development cycles, deployment easily replace even the cheapest or most realistic testing Slide 13: II. Trends In addition: accessibility is often seen as an impediment to creative design The guidelines are seen as restrictions leading to a gap between accessibility and design gThey look at sites that are meant to serve as models of accessibility and are appalled by the aesthetics. For most designers, accessibility equates with boring, uninteresting designs. The state of accessibility on the web today represents a failure of the imagination. Regan, B. (2004). Design: Accessibility and design: a failure of the imagination. Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility. 29-37. Slide 14: II. Trends Design is moving towards the edges People can design their own products They are reimagining how their products are used by modifying, tweaking, adding, building, etc. These adaptations also cause a double usability challenge First, the system must provide users a straightforward way to make changes (e.g., APIs, help files, parts libraries) The second challenge is guiding new users to make their new products usable and accessible Slide 15: II. Trends These engaged and creative people are not likely to be understood using standard usability methods This is the variability problem and the long tail Standard methods rely on the similarity rather than focusing on individual innovations or usage patterns If user-driven innovation and content continue, anecdotal evidence will begin to outweigh the generalized statistics of usability Methods are needed that can identify lead users, their unique characteristics, and homegrown innovations in order to remain relevant Slide 16: II. Trends Developers can design on their own Usabilitys rise (and potential fall) mirrors the web Early on, usability and accessibility evaluated problems with existing sites and proposed guidelines for design Many of the simple problems have been solved and we are working up the ladder of complexity Traditional methods quantify data with metrics that were relevant early on, now they are rudimentary at best More complex assessment methods are needed to address the more complex issues that remain Slide 17: II. Trends New metrics like affect, stickiness, buy-in, loyalty, and engagement are difficult to test within the confines of classic usability and accessibility How can we revise our core tool set toward the new metrics? These days developers are likely to know the underlying usability principles They have already solved basic problems in their products The field has to tackle the more complex problems to remain relevant Slide 18: II. Trends An accessibility dilemma at the production end There is social problem at the core of most accessibility recommendations Web application and content developers are required to spend too much time working on accessibility for which they receive too little Creating accessible web content is a substantial investment of time and money On some sites, hundreds or thousands of pages of legacy content must be changed Slide 19: In addition, the benefits of creating accessible web content is often not obvious Few developers are willing rework old content when so much new content needs to be created They do not have a good sense of the extent to which their effort improves the digital experience of the people using their products and services In general: current usability and accessibility work is an artifact of an earlier computer ecosystem, out of step with contemporary computing realities Goal: an approach that costs developers less and provides greater advantages to a larger group of users Slide 20: II. Trends Accessibility and usability now and in the future I. Introduction: accessibility and usability Accessibility standards arent working Usability practice is lagging behind II. Trends Movement towards ubiquity Design is moving towards the edges An accessibility dilemma at the production end III. Possibilities Holistic accessibility and usability Slide 21: III. Possibilities Develop agile usability and accessibility to address the challenges of rapid deployment Use ubiquity to as an asset Reuse artifacts from the always on culture for design and research purposes Make methods contextual by moving research closer to the field, improving the data while reducing the overhead Embrace users as designers Focus on collaborative research and participatory design Explore holistic approaches Slide 22: III. Possibilities Take seriously contexts of use Characteristics of people using ICTs: the abilities and disabilities of the target users Domain requirements: the tasks that need to be supported, group, social and cultural dynamics, communication patterns, environmental factors Technological requirements: availability of hardware and software and the availability of plug-ins Performance requirements: task success rates, task- completion times, satisfaction ratings, and quality of task output Slide 23: III. Possibilities The key measure of an ICT is whether it fits its context of use Can the people for whom it is designed use it with acceptable levels of usability and accessibility? Can they use it for the tasks that they need to do, in any social setting in which these tasks take place with the same relative level of effort as an abled person? Is the ICT accessible in different contexts of use? Can it be made available to people who need it art a reasonable cost? Slide 24: III. Possibilities So you are off to a good start at this conference The economics of accessibility and usability Costing, purchasing The technologies of accessibility and usability Working with CMS Assistive technologies The sociology of accessibility and usability Educational promotion, pedagogy Best practices, generating buy-in and administrative support Slide 25: Howard Rosenbaum hrosenba@indiana.edu