Those of you who read my overview of accessibility and social media back in June know that I spoke about the subject at the ScotWeb2 unconference. Liz Ayzan, from LGEO Research, has kindly posted a section of my talk to YouTube (also available via Liz’s blog post about the event). I thought (in keeping with the very theme of the talk) that I should offer a text alternative of that video. A full summary of the talk can still be found on my original overview (as linked above).
Posts Tagged ‘screen readers’
Auto-play: a usability and accessibility failure
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009My 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:
- Automatically playing audio on a webpage is usually an action which the user will not expect. It is therefore, at the very least, an irritation, especially if the user is in an environment where this is not appropriate.
- At worst, though, the audio may conflict with other audio that the user is already listening to. That might be music, or perhaps another video. But far worse, it could be a blind user’s screen reader software, and the resulting conflict would make it very hard to browse that page to pause the video or mute the sound.
More about why autoplay is bad for usability and accessibility
Event review – Accessibility breakfast @ User Vision Edinburgh, 15th June 2009
Monday, June 15th, 2009I’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
Screen Reader Survey results
Monday, February 2nd, 2009WebAIM have recently published the results of their Survey of Screen Reader user preferences. There’s already been a lot of coverage of the results, but I’ve summed up a few keys points that I found particularly interesting.
Summary of respondents
- 1121 responses
- 90% of respondents were full-time Screen Reader (SR) users
- 58% considered themselves expert or advanced SR users
- 74% use JAWS, 23% Windows Eyes, 8% NVDA, 6% Voice Over
Some key points
First visit to a page
35% of respondents tend to navigate through or listen to the links on a new page, whilst 46% read through whole the page. The latter tended to be the behaviour of more proficient users, who will usually have their verbosity and read speed settings cranked up to make page reading a lot faster.
Skip links
Only 22% of respondents always use Skip Links, where available. 10% claimed they never use them. Regarding the naming of Skip Links, 22% preferred ‘Skip to Content’, 28% preferred ‘Skip to Main Content’, whilst only 6% liked ‘Skip Navigation’. This would seem to be a very useful finding.
Headings
An important one, this. 52% said they always use Headings to navigate a page, whilst 24% do so often. Also, the more proficient the user was, the more likely they were to use Headings in this way. This underlines the importance of correctly structuring your pages with Headings.
Search
As you’d imagine, over half of the respondents like to use Search, where available. Again this underlines the importance of making any Search function usable and relevant.
Pop-up windows
A mixed response to this one, with 25% saying they found pop-ups very difficult to handle, whilst 17% said they were not at all difficult. This could be clearly linked to the users’ proficiency, so whilst it may not affect the experts, avoiding pop-ups will greatly help the less proficient users.
Identification of photos
Quite a big surprise… 80% would prefer the alt description “Photo of the White House” over just “The White House”. This contradicts the assumption that we should always keep things as short as possible. Important to note that we may not be able to say the same of other such situations (i.e. other types of graphics).
Flash
No great surprise to see that 71% of users found Flash content somewhat difficult or very difficult to access. There are some very accessible implementations of Flash out there, but generally content presented in Flash will cause problems. This was apparently backed up by many strong comments from respondents about the inaccessibility of Flash.
Conclusion
The overall conclusion drawn by WebAIM was that all SR users are unique in their use of the technologies and how they interact with web content. We can make assumptions, informed by research and user testing such as this, but ultimately there will never be a 100% ideal solution. Conforming to international standards, and getting rid of the obvious barriers, are just the first steps to making your content truly accessible to SR users.
Screen Reader survey
Saturday, December 20th, 2008WebAIM are conducting a survey of the preferences of Screen Reader users.
“If you are a full-time, part-time, or even occasional screen reader user, please take a few minutes to complete the survey and provide us with a few details on your screen reader usage and preferences…. The results of the survey will be made public in a few months. We believe the results will be very useful to those who are developing accessible web content.”
The results could be very enlightening, and I’d hope that anyone in a position to reply would do so to help inform best practices in designing websites sympathetic to the needs of these users.
I’ll be sure to report the release of the results in the new year, so watch this space or head over to WebAIM to get it from the horse’s mouth!