Completeness… As you may already know, last week a critique appeared of a paper authored by three friends of mine, Markel Vigo, Justin Brown, and Vivian Conway. Indeed, Markel and I are colleagues in the same laboratory. This critique was written by Karl Groves regarding a paper entitled “Benchmarking web accessibility evaluation tools: measuring the harm of sole reliance on automated tests” and was published at the W4A2013 conference.

Some new work - just off the press: We provide 17 coping tactics visually disabled users employ on the Web. We frame problematic situations that provoke tactics within the context of coping theory. Coping tactics are behavioural markers of cognitive processes that indicate problematic situations. Detecting tactics enables alleviating problematic situations and opens new avenues in web evaluation and modelling. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2013.08.002 We’ll get the drafts for open download up ASAP - but in the mean time

Well as you can expect, after the W4A 2013 and W4A Camp 2013 there comes the trip report. I can tell you that the research was excellent and the quality of discussion was awesome. But don’t take my word for it have a look at the videos for each session (below). Social Events every night at the W4A. Thanks to Hiro Takagi for the photo.So is it just me who thinks the work is good and influential?

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.

I’ve been banging on about experiential transcoding for quite awhile now - well since the EPSRC ‘SASWAT’ project and the Google ‘ACup’ project. The rationale is simple, sighted designers build pages to attract a sighted users attention to ‘important’ parts of the website. Even if they aren’t good designers, people will generally look at similar parts of the page as each other - or so eye tracking studies tell us.

Update: Draft paper now online. I told you that accessibility-in-use would start to become more accepted. Apparently the W4A Reviewers - a notoriously tough bunch - seem to agree as they’ve accepted our paper ‘Evaluating Accessibility-in-Use’ to the W4A 2013 Conference in Rio! This acceptance makes triple for our work (Hypertext 2013, Web Science 2013) on Coping strategies and behaviours - and the sets of Web tactics that are used to enact them.

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:

Accessibility in Use, if you haven’t already heard the phrase you better get used to it, because I think it is such a simple yet elegant concept that its here to stay. It’s simple, and yet its also a coda into a whole heap of concepts we take for granted. Originally, Vigo and Brajnik described in their 2011 paper [1] , and elaborated on in the forthcoming W3C WAI RDWG Note of Accessibility Metrics.

We are fast approaching the paper deadline for the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A). Time to get those papers, communications, demo’s, and student papers polished - because this year we’ll be partying in Rio! We aren’t far off from the W4A 2013 – 13-15th May 2013 – in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and this means it’s time to pull some all-nighters and get those papers in before Feb 15th!

Yes it sounds strange but a key to lung cancer survival is early presentation to health services and evidence shows this can be influenced by information from various sources. The internet is a potentially cost-effective means of disseminating information, 60% UK adults access it almost every day although there are socio-demographic differences in use. Internet use is growing in that part of the population at highest risk of lung cancer and penetration via internet based interventions is becoming increasingly possible.

As I said a few weeks ago, this week it’s Vint Cerf on Accessibility. So what does one of “the fathers of the Internet”, and new ACM President have to say about accessibility and its importance. Actually, for him even to be talking about accessibility sees a significant change from the past; when accessibility was mainly lip-service. So it Vint kicks off by telling us that “I sometimes think that, of all the disciplines, ours ought to be the most effective at adapting to the varied needs of users, including those that are challenged to interact with computing systems in one way or another.

Friday, October 5 2012 marked the one-year anniversary of the passing of Steve Jobs, Apple’s visionary CEO that brought the iPod, iPhone, iPad and a bevy of other devices into the world. Jobs and Apple essentially jump-started the smart-phone revolution, and that revolution has been very useful for the accessibility community. What Now for Accessibility at Apple? Last year I voiced my concerns that Accessibility may be left to degrade (especially if the accountants took over) but maybe I was wrong.

This year at the W4A we used USTREAM to broadcast everything to anybody who wanted to see. We got generally good responses and 20% of the audience was (at some points) watching online. The only complaints came because of the adverts inserted into the stream at the expense of the talks. So at ASSETS there doesn’t seem to be a stream - but I though I’d try an adhoc Google Hangout Broadcast.

The ACM SIGACCESS Student Research Competition (SRC) is a forum for undergraduates and graduate students to present their research, exchange ideas, receive feedback from a panel of experts, and have an opportunity to win awards for their work. Lets see who’s made it this year to the SRC at ASSETS. Don’t be fooled, the SRC submissions go through a number of reviewing steps including a standard review by the SRC judges before they are even accepted to the conference.

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) at the Technical University of Lisbon (UTL) in Lisbon. It was about Deep Accessibility and how we should think about adapting interfaces to suit our senses. Here are my slides and two entries in the style of a Tiny Transactions on Computer Science (TinyToCS); “the premier venue for computer science research of 140 characters or less”.

Our analysis shows that for the most popular 500 sites, JavaScript is used in 93%, Flash in 27% and about one-third (30%) use XMLHttpRequest, a technology used to generate dynamic updates. Uptake of XMLHttpRequest is approximately 2.3% per year across a random selection of 500 sites and is probably higher in the most popular sites. So, when examining dynamic updates from the perspective of visually disabled users, evidence suggests that, at best, most users can currently reach updated content, but they must do so manually, and are rarely given any automated indication that any update has occurred.

Or rather - “A cross-disciplinary approach to identifying requirements for an online health and social support system for people with lung cancer”. This was our submission to the ACM ASSETS 2012 Conference, but unfortunately was rejected - to some extent because it didn’t fit a limited -in my opinion- view of the definition of accessibility and its link with disability. Our abstract asserts that people with lung cancer have reduced access to peer support due to situational and combinatorial impairments (including those related to ageing).

Web accessibility metrics are an invaluable tool for researchers, developers, governmental agencies and end users. Accessibility metrics help indicate the accessibility level of websites, including the accessibility level of individual websites, or even large-scale surveys of the accessibility of many websites. Recently, a plethora of metrics has been released to complement the A, AA, and AAA Levels measurement used by the WAI guidelines. However, the validity and reliability of most of these metrics are unknown and those making use of them are taking the risk of using inappropriate metrics.

We undertook a study of validity and reliability of WCAG 2.0 and found that an 80% target for agreement is not attainable, when audits are conducted without communication between evaluators. Even with experienced evaluators the error rate is relatively high; and further, untrained accessibility auditors -be they developers or quality testers from other domains- do much worse than this. Read the full published text via ACM Author-izer Open Access on the publications page.

Last week I was talking about Deep Accessibility, and trying to define what it might be (who knows if I’m right). I said that in reality I thought it was pretty difficult to create a kind of Deep Accessibility, but that it was possible and necessary, and it was not just about disability but about all of us being able to access the information and functionality as we want or need.

To make Mustikka-rahkapizza, you need vettä. It’s a recipe I learnt while in Helsinki on holiday, but I could not have learnt this without my smart translator app which uses a combination of camera, OCR, and translation engine to give me a view onto that recipe I would not normally have. In this case the paper recipe was made accessible by my translator application; which added value by converting and adding information via a computational process.

Last week I said that ‘If open data, and its access by citizens, is as important as governments seem to think, then the deep accessibility of that data is just as important.’ Now, we’ve seen the specific case in relation to Big Open Data; but what do I mean by deep accessibility in more general terms…? Most of us know what accessibility is - or at least we think we do.

It seems to me there is a gap between accessibility as we understand it today and the new requirements implied by todays fast moving, complex, and large data. This data is beyond the ’limited’ user/author created content for which the current guidelines (focused on P. O. U. R.) were designed. Indeed, think back to Christmas and the analysis and collation of usability principles resulting in the principles of: Dialog Yields Closure; Consistency & Standards; Exploit Constraints; Support Control & Freedom; Simple Error Handling; Familiarity; Informative Feedback; Help & Documentation; Resumption of Interrupts; Self Describing; Heuristic Evaluation; Learnability; Real-Virtual Mappings; Reduce Memory Load; Support Navigation & Freedom; Easy Reversal of Actions; Safety; Provide Shortcuts; Simplicity; Attention Singularity of Focus; Task Suitability & Conformance; Flexibility; Universal Commands; Utility; and Make Things Visibility.

The transcript for the RDWG mobile access symposium is out. This text is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) or captioning are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. SHADI ABOU-ZAHRA: Let’s get started. This is the start of the mobile accessibility symposium. Thank you, everybody, for joining. My name is Shadi Abou-Zahra. I’m the staff contact, W3C staff contact for the research and development working group that is organizing this on-line symposium on mobile accessibility.

Yesterday (25th June 2012), the W3C WAI RDWG conducted its second symposium, this time on Mobile Accessibility. Here are my early thoughts on the themes and topics discussed. Mobile devices are becoming increasingly important and are already the primary form of accessing the Web in many parts of the world. However, people with disabilities experience many difficulties when they access the Web with mobile devices. The symposium aimed to bring researchers and practitioners together to discuss these challenges and possible solutions, and develop a roadmap for future research and development in the field.

Seven years ago, or so, Yeliz and I decided Web Accessibility researchers needed a primer on the domain. We felt there was plenty of practical advice, but no research advice. In this case we decided to create a book1 on the subject. The other day we see that - with 4263 - the message seems to be getting out. You are surely aware that your book Web Accessibility is published in both print and electronic formats.

‘Caring for a person with Alzheimer’s can feel like a prison term spent in solitary confinement.’ Gran & Grandad (circa 1975) Carers for people with Alzhimer’s are faced with five key problems: - **Technological Disenfranchisement** carers of people with Alzheimer’s are normally their spouse or partner and are therefore of the same approximate age as the cared-for. This means that the carer has the associated disenfranchisement with: technology, computers, the Web, and digital-life in general, as would be expected of any senior citizen; - **Isolation** people with Alzheimer’s become increasingly dependent on their carer.

Last week I proposed that we moderate or move our accessibility, assistive technology, rehabilitation engineering, and eHealth efforts away from direct solutions for people with Alzheimer’s and start to concentrate more on those who do the caring. Based on our experiences, there are seven pieces of practical advice I’d like to give to families who will soon become carers, and the elucidation of some of the unique problems we need to think about with regard to technical provision (next week).

At 04:48 on Wednesday 25th April 2012 my Mum died of Alzheimer’s. She’d had the illness for four years and over the last three to four months been in and out of hospital. Over the last weeks I’ve been thinking about how ‘we’ perceive Alzheimer’s, and how the people with the condition perceive it and how it affects their perceived quality of life. This is the first of what I intend to be four posts over the next few weeks on the subject.

Another innovative feature of this years W4A was the W4ACamp help on the newly instigated ‘Crazy Wednesday’. I’m happy to say we lived up to the spirit of the day, meeting in a hotel bar at 09:30-12:30 and running impromptu attendee led discussions while stealing network, and being fuelled on coffee from the hotel staff! As it happened the the camp split into four, with a number of people switching between groups half way through - after 1h30m.

As David Sloan tells us the W4A is ’the biggest annual gathering of the web accessibility research community.’ and this year’s Keynote - By Prof. Jim Hendler - was a ‘Doozy’. Indeed, you don’t have to take my word for it you can see Jim Hendler at the W4A12 for yourself - recorded (apologies for the adverts) live and saved on the W4A USTREAM Channel! In brief Jim, made the case that accessibility goes beyond that of simple access by disabled users into something much deeper, and more opaque.

It seems to me that moving ActiveTiles from a visual UI to an auditory format may be very useful for providing point Gist updates, and fast systems overview status information Now, as you may know my thing is auditory glancing - and in the ‘mainstream’ glance interfaces. Interfaces that give you the ‘gist’ of something but not directly a summary of the content; an interface which enable you to answer the question ‘Is this useful (to me)?

I wanted to call ourW4A paper ‘Define Accessibility!’ as both a challenge and a call, but I was overruled so it’s actually called ‘Understanding Web Accessibility and Its Drivers’. Here’s a sneaky peek at the abstract ahead of time! “Access is what the web is ‘about’, it is the motivation behind its creation, and it is the rationale behind HTML. The desire to pro­vide all users at CERN with the ability to access all documents was Tim Berners ­Lee’s primary goal, and this goal must also be carried through to equal access for all users.

This year the W4A be running a joint W4A WWW 2012 panel on accessibility and its definition at WWW 2012. This will be on Wednesday the 18th at WWW2012 but will be free entry to W4A Pass holders. The organizers (of which I’m one) suggest that there are many different views of web accessibility with many questions to be answered: what is the relationship between web accessibility and usability? Is web accessibility for all or is it strictly for disabled people?

Simply, ‘yes please!’ to the newly proposed Indie UI! See what their charter says (if it gets approved). You see, this WG reminds me of the old Device Independence working group - which should never have lost its charter - and further dovetails into my view of Accessibility which is more about moving barriers to effective use - such that anyone can accomplish effect interactions regardless of, and not limited to impairment or disability.

A new departure this year for the W4A - on Wednesday morning of conference week there will be the first W4A conference / camp; and it’s free! The organisers say: It is free, anyone can attend BUT there are no facilities - we may be ‘reclaiming the streets’, squatting in the hotel lobby or bar, under a tree in the park, or in someones hotel room, and sniffing for Wi-Fi where ever we can get it.

‘Instead of building a new association, if the aim is to remove barriers to access, then we should contribute directly of the ACM/IEEE curriculum effort, we should add information to the Opera Web Standards curriculum, and the W3C WAI EOWG. We need to get access education across all teaching and learning resources and into existing curriculum’s.’ As you’re reading this a session, over at CSUN, will be starting which is discussing the creation of an association of accessibility professionals:

I discussed the first RDWG Symposium on Web Accessibility Metrics last week; here, as promised, is the full and un-edited transcript! So without further adieu, I’d like to give the floor to the symposium chairs, Giorgio and Markel, maybe just give a few introductory words, just a minute or two, and then we’ll get started with moderating the individual sessions. And again, instructions will be provided as we go step by step on how this Online Symposium – how the logistics will work out for that.

The thing about Richie, which as human factors people, we should all aspire to is both the longevity and practicality, the aspiration and the pragmatism, of the work - Even when Bell / AT &T removed the funding for the project - they just built it anyway and released it publicly to non-commercial interests. This is the kind of ethos I wish to cultivate and the ethos I aspire to have.

Without the option of a Job’s return, will Apple once more sacrifice software and systems quality? If so then I would imagine VoiceOver to be on the hit list of ’things we can pay lip service too’. With the untimely death of Steve Jobs - I wonder ‘what now for accessibility at Apple?’ You may think this is a strange question, Steve Jobs not being know for his accessibility insights, and I’d agree - but all I can go on is hearsay.

In Love Again; with the International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. In Love Again! Well I don’t think it is any secret that in my opinion the last few years programme at ASSETS have included a number of papers I didn’t consider to be solid or particularly scientific, with a focus less on the technical aspect (the CS, that is the remit of the ACM and their SIGS) as opposed to sociology.

Thoughts on day three of the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. Day three started with yet another volley of good papers including our own (cough) in the Web Accessibility session Chaired by Jeff Bigham. The session also included excellent work from Sato et al from IBM Japan on whispered auditory cues for older users, and geo-political Web accessibility monitoring (VaMoLa) from Mirri et al at the University of Bologna; with a full room, a number of switched-on questions directed to each presenter ensued.

Thoughts on day two of the The 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. A bazaar coincidence; the first session again provided to haul of good work! From ‘Humsher’ the soft-keyboard controlled (quite well, it seems) by humming different notes/tones; ‘ACES’, an Aphasia emulator which looks like it may provide us with a way of showing developers just the kind of missing aspects of language an aphasic user would experience (may favourite for today); and on to ‘We Need to Communicate!

Thoughts on day one of the The 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. I’m not normally a cup-half-full kind of a guy, but the end of the first day of a good conference always produces a certain melancholia at the realisation that soon, these interesting academic conversations will be done. ASSETS 2011 produces just such a feeling because the quality of the first day has been excellent. The two most important sessions for me were the Keynote and the first session on Assistive Technology Design Paradigms.

“I recently blogged about a EU CARDIAC meeting in San Sebastian, discussing low income - ‘Identify human factors barriers to health, education, and participation of low income groups.’ stating that ‘There are significant and untapped opportunities to use technology better on behalf of citizens, communities, and digitally disenfranchised groups.’” I actually said that the opportunities created by digital technologies are not enjoyed by the whole of society, indeed, there is a strong correlation between digital exclusion and social exclusion.

‘Web pages judged on the classical dimension as being visually clean showed significant correlations with accessibility, suggesting that visual cleanness may be a suitable proxy measure for accessibility as far as people with visual impairments are concerned. Expressive designs and other aesthetic dimensions showed no such correlation, however, demonstrating that an expressive or aesthetically pleasing Web design is not a barrier to accessibility.’ In a few short weeks we’ll be off to the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility which runs from 24-26 October, 2011 in Dundee, United Kingdom.

“For the last four years we have been working with the W3C to try and restart the Research and Development Interest Group which was previously, and ably, chaired by Markku Hakkinen. I’m glad to say that after much discussion within the W3C the group has been relaunched as a working group. This new group has a two-year charter, had its first weekly meeting in June, and has already chosen its first topic to be focused on.

While consensus does not automatically imply correctness, it’s a fair bet that gathering a group of twenty accessibility experts in the same room and asking them what they want to see funded by the EU in the coming years, may very well produce an important research agenda for the future. This was the plan of the EU funded coordinated-action CARDIAC Project, and so at the end of June, approximately 20 project members and invited experts gathered in San Sebastian to decide what was important for the future.

“These commissioning constraints not only have a direct bearing on the decision as to which methodologies to use but also how the evaluation design is created.” I’ve recently been thinking more about the real world problems of UX and HCI evaluations for a book chapter I’m writing on how it’s really done. Textbook approaches to experimental design, and the choice of research methodologies, often rely solely on selecting the best methodology for the job at hand.

“I took the time to ‘bang-on’ about the convergence of devices and people such that assistive technology would be - in the end - just another user device; pushing the aspects of extreme customisation, adaptation, and personalisation - all of which I think future accessibility issues are really all about.” I was recently in Brussels for a meeting at the EU commission as an invited expert on the eAccessibility2020 project. Now this project has some similarities with work in progress at the W3C WAI RDWG in looking at future accessibility and surrounding issues:

I can hear the gentle swooshing of the the Rhône and Saône rivers because W4A 2012 is ready to go and situated in Lyon, France. With a theme dedicated (but not exclusively1) to ‘The Web of Data and Accessibility’ I’d expect some interesting papers this year! I see that the The W4A is ready to go with it’s 2012 offering in it’s 9th incarnation. The International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A) is the main conference on Web Accessibility bringing together computer scientists, psychologists, accessibility experts and technologists from academia and industry.

"Open Volunteer Exchange is a distributed platform to enable volunteering organisations to Exchange volunteers. It was created by J.P Lacerda, Damo Walsh, and Sam van Lieshout (First Years at The University of Manchester) and mentored by me. The aim of the project is to enable people to quickly organise events requiring a group of volunteers with diverse skills." I’m pleased to say that the team I mentor for the Microsoft Imagine Cup won the UK National Finals and are now in New York at the World Finals!

“The SDK is open source and can easily be used by accessibility researchers and developers alike. Why not try it?” ACTF is a framework that serves as an extensible infrastructure upon which researchers can build a variety of utilities that help to evaluate and enhance the accessibility of applications and content for people with disabilities. A collection of example utilities are also provided which were created on top of the framework such as compliance validation tools, assistive technology simulation applications, usability visualisation tools, unit-testing utilities, and alternative accessible interfaces for applications.

“It seems to me that gamification may be useful to add a little spice but that without answers to the possible transfer of negative game playing traits the amount of value-added may turn out to be smaller then we imagine.” I’ve recently been having a twitter conversation with Rui about gamification in the context of UX. Now I see myself as far more circumspect than Rui, in that I see gamification as a convenient term to describe ‘digital umami ’1.

“We believe that high-complexity interaction, defined by choice and flexibility, is the key problem. Choice and flexibility are normally seen as positive in that, from a technology perspective, ‘more’ adds-value; however we disagree and propose a counter intuitive investigation of the benefits of the opposing principles centred around inflexibility and constraint. The object of this PhD project is to empirically test this belief.” The World Wide Web (Web) is a vast information and communication resource which is now seen as vital for commerce, social interaction, welfare, and citizen empowerment; however, it still remains ‘off-limits’ to the older user.

We believe that a combinatorial approach to evaluation may be more effective than those applied by individual tools and engines. The object of this PhD project is to empirically test this belief. Understanding website conformance to specifications, guidelines, accessibility and usability requirements is currently a complicated - and for the most part unachievable - process. A problem amplified where human interaction is required for evaluation, or when different evaluation engines produced different results.

I was recently ask to perform a barrier walkthrough on the wordpress.com front page. As a side note I must say that Firefox with Firebug proved really useful when it came to answering some of the more code/css based questions in the walkthrough. In the end the page did quite well but it’s a kind of internal mash-up with what looks like different coders developing different parts of the page.

The World Wide Web (Web) is a crucial resource for the employment, social networking, and entertainment of visually disabled1 users. However, Web pages are designed for visual interaction, and badly built pages, or those transformed into alternative forms (e.g, audio) by assistive technologies, loose the richness of the visual presentation and structural formatting, thereby becoming inaccessible. Our previous studies suggest that visually disabled users encounter two types of problem: those which are expected and can be adapted to, and those which are difficult and stressful, and can only be handled by coping.