When considering some of the recent online surveys that I’ve seen or been involved in setting up, I’m reminded of the saying:
Never assume. It makes an ass of u and me.
Anon
It may be hackneyed, but it does ring true for many of the observations I’ve made around surveys. Here’s my list of the 10 most common assumptions to avoid when conducting an online survey.
Earlier today I signed an online petition to encourage Google to take a leading role in promoting accessible web development. The petition, launched by a Canadian web developer, suggests that
Google has not taken a strong lead in producing standards compliant, accessible web sites. Although contributing to the W3C and other standards bodies, the many sites that Google produces do limit access to people with disabilities. Given the web presence that Google has, this is enough of a problem, however it is worsened by the fact that Google’s model is copied regularly by web developers looking for an industry standard to follow.
A new home for accessibility at Google
Google were impressively quick to respond, posting a link on the petition to a new official blog post entitled A New Home for Accessibility at Google, by accessibility product manager Jonas Klink.
The blog has been a little quiet recently, but will certainly fire up again after next week’s Accessibility 2.0 conference in London, which I plan to live-tweet (#millionflowers) and blog about afterwards here.
Engineering Software for Accessibility
In the meantime, here’s some useful reading courtesy of Microsft Press – Engineering Software and Accessibility. This is a free 100-page download, covering three key questions:
Also worth a visit is IBM’s technical library, which has a new section on Accessibility in Web 2.0 technologies, introducing WAI-ARIA and looking at accessible Web 2.0 design principles.
Happy reading, and I hope to see some of you in London next week…
My organisation recently published a number of videos on the public website (EDIT – have removed the link as the videos have been taken off now). Those videos started automatically as soon as the page loaded. The problems with this are:
More about why autoplay is bad for usability and accessibility
My presentation at ScotWeb2 - photo courtesy of Jadu
This post explores some of the issues that I plan to discuss with attendees at tomorrow’s ScotWeb2 event in Edinburgh, regarding the current state of accessibility on Social Media sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. I hope to have some interesting feedback to post here after tomorrow, so for now here’s an overview of the subject. I’ve also thrown in a few open questions to kick-start the discussion.
[Edit: see a summary of the event on the ScotWeb2 blog]
Read the rest of my introduction to Social Media accessibility
I’ve just come back from a very interesting breakfast event at the local office of User Experience consultants User Vision. Led by accessibility consultant Mark Palmer, the session looked at issues around testing with disabled users, and presented some of the surprising results from such testing.
More about the breakfast event
I only just discovered that WordPress has a built-in quicktag for identifying excerpts of posts, to be displayed on the homepage (rather than showing the entire post). For many of you this will be old news, but for those of you who aren’t, read on…
Read more about making the More tag accessible
This week (4th – 10th May 2009) is Deaf Awareness Week. This year’s theme, “Look At Me”, aims to:
improve understanding of the different types of deafness by highlighting the many different methods of communication used by deaf, deafened, deafblind and hard of hearing people, such as sign language and lipreading.
For a while now I’ve been working on a business case to pilot a project, offering key content from our website in the form of video of a British Sign Language interpreter. The following is an extract from that business case, explaining why such content could be valuable:
(more…)