Computers in Libraries 2013 - Day 2 - UX & Accessibility Pecha Kucha

First, for the uninformed, "UX" is an abbreviation for "User Experience" and a Pecha Kucha is a kind of rapid presentation where the speakers are supposed to have 20 slides and can spend no more than 20 seconds on each slide.

With those definitions out of the way, this was a not entirely strictly enforced series of four pecha kuchas all on the topic of user experience and accessibility.

The first presentation was made by Randy Oldham of the University of Guelph.  He had a nice, short overview of four tools that can be handy for evaluating a website's accessibility:

WAVE – Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. Free. Overlays tags on a view of a webpage where there are accessibility problems. 

W3C MarkupValidation Service - Free.  This is not as graphical as WAVE, but pretty easy to understand. Rather than checking specifically for accessibility, this checks for valid HTML, but valid HTML is the first step to accessible websites.

FANGS – Free Firefox Plugin. Shows you what text would be read by a screen reader on any site you test.  Helps you appreciate the situation that a blind user might encounter.

Web Developerextension – Free plugin for Firefox & Chrome. Has a lot of features including a display of the tab index (if you hit the tab key on a webpage what the progression of selections is) and the ability to run a detailed report on 508 compliance for a webpage.

Randy's presentation was followed by a presentation by Frank Cervone of Purdue University Calumet providing some tips and thoughts about accessibility.

Frank started out by emphasizing that more people have disabilities than web developers might think.  Of those aged 55 to 65, 36% have a disability of some kind.  Of those aged 22-44, 15% have a disability of some kind.

As a result, it is quite important to keep the disabled in mind when doing web design and universal design is a key.  It's also important not to let ill-informed dogmatism get in the way of good overall design.  In other words just because graphics can cause accessibility problems in designs you needn't always avoid using them.  You can and should use graphics, but you just need to remember to make them accessible.

There are many places where accommodations are often necessary that web designers may not consider, such as text supplemented by audio, audio supplemented by text, or video supplemented by transcription.

A designer needs to make sure that the user has control over magnification, scrolling text and suppressing pop-up windows.  Providing keyboard equivalents to mouse commands, such as access keys, or providing supplemental graphics or allowing the freezing of animated graphics can also help make a site more accessible.

Frank also recommended some additional tools including Fujitsu Accessibility Tools, a Reading Effectiveness Tool (it is best to write to a 6th grade level sites targeted to a general audience) and Project Cannect, which has a guide for creating accessible content.

Joanna Karpinski of the National Library of Medicine presented their findings from usability testing of the NIHSeniorHealth.gov website as part of a redesign project.

The site she was working on is designed for people aged 60 and older and when they noticed decreased usage of the site they did some usability testing to try and discover why.  They found that older adults really didn't like images. They also found that older adults didn't like navigation that had more than one level.

Scrolling, which they had intentionally avoided in a prior design, was found not to be too much of an issue, although having pages that were more than two screens was something to be avoided.

They also found that their users were particular about how search results of the site were displayed.  Users were happiest when they were presented no refinement options, the snippets in the search results had sufficient content (2-3 sentences), the search terms were highlighted in bold in snippets, and the colors were familiar.

After making the changes their users were happier with the site.

The fourth presentation was made by Shimin Chen of St. Joseph's University and was about the use of fonts in responsive web design.

I liked what I understood in his presentation, although unfortunately he had a very heavy accent that was difficult to comprehend. In his presentation he demonstrated the process of putting custom fonts and vector graphics on a website and setting up code in cascading style sheets that would properly scale the graphics on the fly based on the screen resolution.  He indicated a lot of sources for graphics and fonts including FontSquirrel, IcoMoon, Entypo, FreeVector, CSS Tricks and Fontello.  I think I really would have liked the presentation had I fully understood it and it has made me want to look more into this subject.