the art of web accessibility

Personas in Accessibility

June 12th, 2013 by Steve | 2 Comments on Personas in Accessibility | Filed in Accessibility Thoughts, user experience

Silhouette of a person A co-worker and fellow User Experience designer asked some good questions the other day about the merits of creating personas — including who their ideal audiences should be and how to evangelize them. We all weighed in, and afterwards it got me thinking about what role personas should play in accessibility.

For those unfamiliar, a persona is a fictional person based on your actual users. Leveraging research and observation of people who use your product, you craft a representation, right down to giving him or her a name, using a picture (photo or sketched), and filling in attributes like their background, desires, typical work day, etcetera.

Personas provide alternatives to vague, impersonal references like “Users should be able to blah blah blah” or “The technician needs this feature because of X,Y,Z”. It’s an effective way to create empathy and remind everyone — stakeholders, developers, fellow designers, project managers — that the product being designed has actual people at the end of the road who’ll need or want to use it.

I’ve created personas during a current project, and they seemed to resonate immediately with certain people. Our primary stakeholder started referring to one of them by name a lot. Some teams hung them up outside their cubicles as a reminder.

It’s sometimes challenging to keep them front and center throughout the lifespan of a project, but in short it’s a way to put a human face with real needs, concerns, and motivations to what otherwise can start to become a vague, distant audience when left to bland requirement documents and spreadsheets.

They can be complex or simple. We’ve done nice layouts suitable for printing out. I’ve seen simpler but equally effective approaches.

Source: Explaining Personas used in UX Design – Part 2

In fact, one of the first sources I hit up often when learning about accessibility was Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into Accessibility. The information is over 10 years old, but a lot of it is timeless.

One of the methods he uses to illustrate accessibility issues and solutions for certain types of disabilities is through personas, like Jackie, a 19-year-old who has been blind for 8 years.

This enabled him to refer to these “people” by name throughout his whole book. It gives things a human touch and a seemingly real person who you really feel for and remember.

This all leads to what I’ve been thinking about lately. First off, it seems undeniably useful to incorporate disabilities into personas — when appropriate and naturally.

Mark’s personas all being disabled of course work because of intent of his book. But generally speaking for the average web site or application, it feels risky to approach it like, “Okay, now I’m going to create the disabled persona”. It should be more natural and less contrived, by weaving a disability in more subtly than that.

If you have five personas that represent different types of users of your product, maybe it makes perfect sense to mention that one of them is colorblind and often has troubles when applications don’t use distinctive enough colors. Maybe if your audience is older, one of your personas should convey that small fonts are a real burden because of weakening eyesight.

I’d love to hear from people who have woven accessibility into personas. I’ve not done it myself…yet.

Tags: personas, ux

On Writing – Why I Blog

May 29th, 2013 by Steve | Comment on On Writing - Why I Blog | Filed in Accessibility Thoughts, Writing

The other day, I was going down one of those nostalgic rabbit holes on the Internet. You know, where you think of something, do some web searches about it, which lead to other web searches, and the next thing you know, you’ve blown an hour or so.

In this case, I was thinking back to the Forgotten Realms book series that I used to read religiously back in high school. I was, am and will always be a big nerd when it comes to science fiction and fantasy.

The most prominent Forgotten Realms author was (and still is) R.A. Salvatore.

I watched a recent interview with him on Sword & Laser. It was all around pretty interesting but something he said at the end of it (at the 18-minute mark) stuck with me.

I think I transcribed what he said reasonably accurately:

“If you can quit (writing), quit. If you can’t quit, then you’re a writer…if you’re a writer, it means one of the ways that you make your way through life is by asking yourself questions and answering them in your stories…it’s almost like your way of making sense of the world. If you’re a writer, then there’s no way you can not do that and be happy.”

Now, he’s in particular talking about creative writing, and I could write a whole blog post about how I’ve fancied myself a creative writer yet have dozens and dozens of unfinished story fragments that just sit there decade after decade.

But it got me thinking about challenges in blogging, as well as sometimes feeling you have to post for the wrong reasons. I’ve had my ups and downs committing to writing here.

At its height, I’ve had some good runs of quality posts. On the other side of the coin, there have been times I just couldn’t muster up anything compelling and felt like I mailed in a post just to say I wrote one.

In some ways, it’s not the end of world to post just for the sake of it. It keeps me in the practice. On the other, in the past I used to let strange motivations pressure me — like traffic. I felt the need to write just to keep the site fresh and friendly to search engines. What ‘x’ amount of traffic got me in life, I’m not sure, but I felt that it was a necessary sign of success in blogging.

Maybe that’s the old e-commerce background in my career, where things like search engine optimization naturally are important.

In the end, I’ve come to realize this blog is about one thing — an outlet for my passion about accessibility.

Who cares if I write two posts a week, one a month, or whatever else. Who cares if I get fifty visitors today or five. The bottom line is sharing interesting or insightful things with you (whoever you are!) about all things accessibility — web, video games, or completely unrelated to technology.

That being said, I’m still trying my best to stick to one post a week, to avoid letting this blog and my research wane. But the minute it stops becoming fun and feels like a hassle, then it’s not worth continuing.

Tags: blogging, forgotten realms, ra salvatore, sword & laser, writing

Guest Blog Post at mkeUX

May 23rd, 2013 by Steve | Comment on Guest Blog Post at mkeUX | Filed in art of web accessibility update, user experience

Greetings.

I sort of broke my commitment to weekly blog posts last week — I was in California for most of the week, and didn’t have anything teed up to publish.

Ah well – I’m making up for it:

This week, I wrote a guest post for my friends at mkeUX.

Check it out – Accessibility Across Mediums.

If you are anywhere near the Milwaukee area, stay connected with mkeUX. Through their site, social media, and Facebook, they’re sharing great user experience insights, jobs in the field to be aware of, and of course they host informal discussions about all sorts of UX-related topics (and always at places that serve beer).

Tags: blogging, milwaukee, mkeux, user experience

Amazon Releases Accessibility Enhancements to Kindle App

May 8th, 2013 by Steve | Comment on Amazon Releases Accessibility Enhancements to Kindle App | Filed in Accessibility News, Disability Facts

Amazon Kindle app logo Greetings again from my Monday and Wednesday night “office” — Stone Creek Coffee. It’s been helpful in my new quest to blog weekly to have some dedicated time, away from the house and house distractions.

This isn’t hot off the presses, but I’ve been meaning to talk about it. Amazon announced earlier in the month that its iOS Kindle app has been updated with key accessibility features.

You can read more details here, among other places:
Amazon Bringing New Accessibility Features to Free Kindle Reading Apps

Not unlike my Apple love, I’ve always been a fan of Amazon since their early days, and one of my favorite purchases of the last year was my Kindle Touch. Despite having the unintended consequence of making me not enjoy physical books anymore, it’s gotten me back into reading.

Anyway, some of the high points of its enhancements:

Leveraging Apple’s VoiceOver so that users can hear a vast number of titles read aloud
Using the accessibility features (such as Zoom and Assistive Touch) within iOS
Enhancing the ability for blind users to access a bunch of Kindle features like navigating, searching, taking notes, and using reference materials

The app itself is free, though of course most books have to be purchased.

It certainly sounds like steps in a good direction. The more avenues that open up for blind readers to enjoy literature, beyond the much more limited options of Braille for example, the better.

I’ll be interested to hear how disabled users, particularly those with visual constraints, find these features in action. Is it a good start? Could they be doing more? Feel free to weigh in!

Tags: amazon, assistive touch, iOS, ipad, iphone, kindle, reading, VoiceOver, zoom

Great Accessibility Quote

May 1st, 2013 by Steve | Comment on Great Accessibility Quote | Filed in Accessibility Thoughts, user experience, Video Games

Alright – let’s try this again. I’m not only attempting (for the umpteenth time) to post with regularity, but I’m going to try it once a week.

As I sit here enjoying a blueberry blossom honey latte (trust me, it’s awesome, despite how weird it may sound) at Stone Creek Coffee, I’ve been poking around the Internet to see what’s been up in the world of accessibility.

I found a quote about accessibility that really resonates.

Check out the great article, Everyone Should Be Able To Play Video Games. There’s lot of insight from Steve Spohn from AbleGamers, whom you’ll remember from my two-part interview with him back in early 2010 (see: AbleGamers Interview and AbleGamers Interview wrap-up.

The line that stuck out:

“Electronic Arts has won our game of the year 80% of the time, and if you talk to EA, they do not design for disabilities. They design for good game design. They make accidentally accessible designs. If you make game design as friendly as you can and make it for as many gamers as you can, you will hit a lot of the disabled community.”

For one, it’s refreshing to see something about big giant Electronic Arts that doesn’t involve the usual bashing for being evil and ruining games. But more importantly, it gets to the heart of ideal user experiences.

Good accessibility doesn’t automatically have to mean “extra work” or solely focusing on disabled users. If you create a strong user experience for everyone, you’re already in the right direction for those with disabilities.

Of course, that doesn’t make it as easy as it sounds. If it was, people like me wouldn’t have dedicated careers in user experience. You still should strive as much as possible to be attuned to the needs of disabled users.

But it doesn’t have to come at the expense of everyone else. Everyone will appreciate easy to use controls; concise, clear instructions; navigation or wayfinding that is predictable and easy to find; captioning (as I’ve said before, I always turn on captions when I play video games, and I don’t have a hearing disability); etcetera etcetera…

See you next week!

Tags: ablegamers.com, electronic arts, user experience, ux, Video Games

the art of web accessibility

Personas in Accessibility

On Writing – Why I Blog

Guest Blog Post at mkeUX

Amazon Releases Accessibility Enhancements to Kindle App

Great Accessibility Quote

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