W3CWeb Accessibility initiative

WAI: Strategies, guidelines, resources to make the Web accessible to people with disabilities

Editors Draft: $Date: 2009/10/31 00:25:03 $ [changelog]
Status: This document is a draft and should not be referenced or quoted under any circumstances. A published version of a similar document is at: www.w3.org/WAI/eval/users.html. Please send comments to wai-eo-editors@w3.org (a publicly archived list).

[Draft] Including Users for Better, Easier Accessibility

Page Contents

Introduction

A key aspect of designing for usability is including users throughout project development. However, when designing for accessibility, developers often do not include users with disabilities at all, or only at the end of the development process for testing.

Involving people with disabilities from the beginning — when redesigning websites, developing accessibility standards, defining technical specifications, etc. — helps you better understand accessibility issues and implement more effective accessibility solutions.

This page gets you started reaping the benefits of involving users with accessibility needs, including people with disabilities and older people, throughout your web projects. When you are at the stage of evaluating accessibility, see also Involving Users in Web Accessibility Evaluation.

How Involving Users Early Helps

Including users in the development process helps you more efficiently develop accessible websites that work well for people with accessibility needs, thus maximizing your return on investment (ROI) in accessibility.

e.g.,

As an example, consider a developer who does not know what it's like to use a screen reader. To meet the web accessibility guideline "Provide text alternatives for all non-text content", the developer might provide alt text such as: "This image is a line art drawing of a dark green magnifying glass. If you click on it, it will take you to the Search page." Such alt text is going to be a lot of work for each image. Now, consider another developer who involved users in her project early and has observed people using the web with screen readers. This developer knows that for such images, the only alt needed is "Search". She gets the job done quicker, and better for users.

The first developers' time has been wasted and the result is annoying for users. And, once the problem is discovered (at testing end or after rollout when users complain), it's going to take more time, effort, and money to go back and fix it.

Understanding how people use your website, browser, or other tool, helps you focus your efforts on accessibility solutions that work well for real users in real situations.

e.g.,

Designers of a financial services website spent quite a bit of effort on a project to determine what was the best way to indicate to users that a large text version of their site was available, that is, what words to use for the link. In the end they learned that most of their target users would not use the alternative version anyway because they were already using screen magnification software or settings.

Understanding users gives you a better perspective on standards and guidelines.

e.g.,

If you only focus on meeting the minimum accessibility standards, you are likely to miss many easy things you can do to improve usability for people with disabilities and older users. For example, some of the WCAG 2.0 Level AAA Success Criteria and Advisory Techniques take just a few minutes to implement. @@example?

When you involve users with accessibility needs early in the project, you increase efficiency, effectiveness, and motivation:

Efficiency

Effectiveness

Motivation

Combine with Standards

Learning how real people use your website is powerful. However, you cannot realistically include enough users to cover all issues. That is where accessibility guidelines come in. Combine user involvement with learning WCAG and evaluating conformance to ensure that accessibility is provided to users with a range of disabilities and situations.

How to Involve Users in Project Development

If you are already using user-centered design processes (UCD) or other usability methodologies and techniques, simply ensure that your usability goals, user analysis, personas, scenarios, workflows, etc. include people with disabilities and older users.

If you are not using UCD, you can still include people with accessibility needs in your design and development. As early as possible in your project:

  1. Learn the basics of how people with disabilities use the web by reading online resources and watching videos.
  2. Find people with disabilities, with a range of characteristics. (more on this below)
  3. Ask them to show you websites that work well for them. Then, ask them to show you problems in websites that do not work well. Ask lots of questions to help you understand their accessibility issues.
  4. Include people with disabilities and older users with accessibility needs in any user analysis, use cases, design walkthroughs, or other techniques you use.
  5. When you are considering a design aspect, such as expanding/collapsing navigation, find sites on the web that are already doing it and have users explore with you what works well and what does not.
  6. Throughout your design and development, ask users to review prototypes. Give them specific tasks to complete and see how the different aspects of the design and coding could be improved. For more in this, see Involving Users in Web Accessibility Evaluation. Ask lots of questions.

Caution: Carefully consider all feedback and avoid assuming that feedback from one person with a disability applies to all people with disabilities. A person with a disability does not necessarily know how other people with the same disability interact with the web, nor know enough about other disabilities to provide valid guidance on other accessibility issues.

Getting a Range of Users

People with disabilities are as diverse as any people. They have diverse experiences, expectations, and preferences. They use diverse interaction techniques, adaptive strategies, and assistive technology configurations. People have different disabilities: auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual — and some have multiple disabilities. Even within one category, there is extreme variation; for example, "visual disability" includes people who have been totally blind since birth, people who have distortion in their central vision from age-related degeneration, and people who temporarily have blurry vision from an injury or disease.

Include users with a variety of disabilities and user characteristics. Most projects have limited time and budget and cannot include many different users. Selecting the optimum number of users with the best suited characteristics can be difficult. There are resources on the web that provide guidance on determining participant characteristics for a particular situation and on finding participants with disabilities.

Users' Experience Interacting with the Web

A primary consideration in selecting users is their experience interacting with the web. For example, some assistive technologies (AT) are complicated and difficult to learn. A user with insufficient experience may not know how to use the AT effectively. On the other hand, a very advanced user might know uncommon work-arounds to overcome problems in the site that the "average" user would not be able to handle.

In the early stages when you are first learning how people with disabilities interact with the web, it is usually best to get people with a fairly high experience level. (Involving Users in Web Accessibility Evaluation says more about different experience levels in later evaluation phases.)

Analyzing Accessibility Issues

Web accessibility depends on several components of web development and interaction working together, including web browsers, assistive technologies (AT), and web content. For any accessibility problems you identify, determine which components are responsible. For example, if a user who cannot use a mouse has trouble with keyboard access, it could be because:

See also the Drawing Conclusions and Reporting section of Involving Users in Web Accessibility Evaluation.

Combine Users with Standards

While including users with disabilities and older users with accessibility needs is key to making your accessibility efforts more effective and more efficient; however, that cannot address all issue. Even large web development projects cannot cover the diversity of disabilities, adaptive strategies, and assistive technologies. That is where standards come in.

Using comprehensive standards such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 helps ensure that you address all issues. Combine user involvement with evaluating conformance to WCAG to ensure that accessibility is provided to users with a range of disabilities and situations.

Notes for usability professionals

@@ which advice specifically for usability professional do we want to include in this doc? note there is some in the other doc?

For More Information

This document briefly addresses a few points of a very complex topic. Many resources on other aspects of involving users throughout design are available on the web.

Terminology and Notes

@@ point to definitions in a central location and delete here? or don't make them jump to a new page?

adaptive strategies
Adaptive strategies are techniques that people with disabilities use to improve interaction with the web, such as increasing the font size in a common browser. Adaptive strategies include techniques with mainstream browsers or with assistive technologies.
assistive technologies
Assistive technologies are software or equipment that people with disabilities use to improve interaction with the web, such as screen readers that read aloud web pages for people who cannot read text, screen magnifiers for people with some types of low vision, and voice recognition software and selection switches for people who cannot use a keyboard or mouse.
user characteristics
User characteristics typically include things like age, job responsibilities, software, hardware, environment (for example, home, shared office, private office, shared public terminal), computer experience, and web experience.User characteristics can also include type of disability, adaptive strategies used, and experience with specific assistive technologies.
web content
Web "content" generally refers to the information in a web page or web application, including text, images, forms, sounds, and such. More specific definitions are available in the WCAG documents, which are linked from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview.