The world is becoming evermore precise - well at least our desire to measure it, quantify it, model it with ever more precision, is increasing. But it’s time to step back and think about just what these models are intended to accomplish. Our work on ‘attention approximation’ is all about understanding where people are placing their attention - while realising that there is a level of precision, moving above which, renders the model we are trying to create, useless - unfit for purpose.

What do you do when the coder’s haven’t included WAI-ARIA in the AJAX. Option 1, ignore it and quote the guidelines; Option 2, try to manually flag it and fix it; or Option 3 try to automatically fix it by programmatically injecting the correct WAI-ARIA directly into content - client side. We discuss Option 3! Simply we saw a need for a way of identifying AJAX in RIAs, deciding on the type of Widget the AJAX represented - calendar picker, tab bar, etc - and deciding if WAI-ARIA was included.

Longitudinal observations in the wild are becoming increasingly seen as the place to look for rich data about the user experience; and this experience is shared by users with disabilities. Thanks to the W4A review committee for understanding this and accepting our communication about our work in the field ‘Understanding Users in the Wild’ a draft of which you can read. In it we say that: Laboratory studies are a well established practice that present disadvantages in terms of data collection.

Update: Draft paper now online. Or at least that is what our WebSci13 paper ‘Considering People with Disabilities as Überusers for Eliciting Generalisable Coping Strategies on the Web’ proposes. Briefly, we see these special behavioural traits (coping strategies) as generally applicable but that because users with disabilities make more use of technology, in much more rich ways than other user groups, they come across these behaviours (and generate solutions to them) much more regularly:

Update 18 March 2013: Paper now available. First look at our recently accepted Hypertext 2013 paper! Little is known about the navigation tactics employed by screen reader users when they face problematic situations on the Web. Understanding how these tactics are operationalised and knowing the situations that bring about such tactics paves the way towards modeling navigation behaviour…. Modeling the navigation of users is of utmost importance as it allows not only to predict interactive behaviour, but also to assess the appropriateness of the content in a link, the information architecture of a site and the design of a web page.