UXD - User eXperience Design

Design? Meet Research.

A running discussions I have with my mom revolves around a cellphone: I think she should have one; she disagrees. I say it makes sense to carry one in case of emergencies; she says her regular phone is good enough for her. I say her regular phone doesn’t work in the car; she states that you shouldn’t talk and drive. Her logic defies a response.

But what I think she really dislikes about cell phones is that they’re just too complicated to use. When my mom looks at my phone, her first question is, well how would I know how to use it?  A valid point. She is accustomed to a landline -- you pick up the handset and there’s a dial tone (no, don’t even start -- she has no cordless phones). Her phone has raised buttons, not a flat touchpad, and these buttons contain numbers, not icons. (I have to admit, I don’t blame her about the icons. I couldn’t even begin to describe the icon on my phone to pick up a call -- it has no name. You have to train yourself as to its meaning.) What she really needs is a phone designed just for her.

Web Accessibility is Good Business

Over the last few years, more and more basic services have been moving to the Web (banking, paying bills, canceling utilities, etc.) Whether the move is initiated as a cost-saving device or as a way to make the services more readily available, the fact is that moving every day "life administration" online means accessibility gains in importance.

Web accessibility is a broad topic but in essence it means your pages are accessible by people using a wide range of user-agent software and devices, in addition to the standard web browsers. The foundation for achieving accessibility is separating out the content and structure from the presentation and behavior of a page.

Use semantic markup to structure the document.

Semantic markup provides a framework for explicitly describing things. It is descriptive enough to allow machines to recognize it and make decisions about navigating a page. For example, the use of header tags <h1> allows users of screen readers to scan the headers on a page. Or a <strong> tag allows an oral user agent to apply a different voice for emphasis. An added benefit is that semantic markup still gives the content visual hierarchy even if the external style sheet fails to load.

Use CSS instead of presentational markup.

Style sheets define presentational characteristics. Presentational markup (e.g., <font>) does that as well, but it does not allow a user to adjust the presentation to suit their needs. When presentation is defined in a style sheet, it allows different users to override the author's styles with their own. This way, a visually impaired user can display a large text alternative by defining his or her own user style.

Ideally you want to use external style sheets so the presentation information for the site is held in one place and can be updated quickly.  In addition, external style sheets enable you to have consistency across pages and  implement global changes in just one file.

The Web Accessibility Initiative of the W3C, of course, has extensive guidelines and details on how to achieve web content accessibility. It's worth reviewing and implementing because after all, you want your site to reach the largest possible audience. Web accessibility increases the odds of doing just that

EU Committed to Accessibility

 

The European Union has called committed itself to providing Internet access to all it's citizens by the year 2010. This is more evidence of the importance of providing quality content which is accessible. You can read the full article here. The decision comes as a result of a few disheartening reports about web accessibility for the disabled. From the CNET news article: "According to recent research, 81 percent of Web sites in the United Kingdom are inaccessible to disabled people, while a separate report found that only 3 percent of European public-sector Web sites met W3C accessibility guidelines." As we as a population grow more dependent on the web, it becomes ever more important to ensure that no one is left behind.

The EU's own site on accessibility policy has a sub area on web accessibility. They mention an initiative known as the European Internet Accessibility Observatory or EIAO. This organization's job is to crawl the web looking for scofflaws -- big brother is crawling.