W3CWeb Accessibility initiative

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

Editors Draft: $Date: 2009/11/13 03:28:04 $ [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] Involving Users in Web Development for Better, Easier Accessibility

Page Contents

Introduction

Involving people with disabilities from the beginning of a project helps you better understand accessibility issues and implement more effective accessibility solutions. This applies when designing and developing:

This page gets you started reaping the benefits of involving people with disabilities and older people with accessibility needs due to aging, throughout your 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 early in projects helps you understand real-world accessibility issues, such as how people with disabilities and older people use the Web with adaptive strategies and assistive technologies. This results in better products for users, more efficient development, and other benefits to project stakeholders.

Better Accessibility and Better Usability for All

When developers understand accessibility issues, they can implement more effective accessibility solutions; for example, their website will work better and be more usable for people with disabilities, older users, and others.

Making websites and web tools more usable for people with a range of disabilities improves general usability for everybody, especially older users and some other target groups. (You could say that involving users with disabilities in your development project gives you improved usability for free.) [@@link to ref, bcase appendix?]

This benefits not only users, but also stakeholders; for example, benefits of increased website use.

Understanding Leads to More Efficient Development

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

When you understand how people use the Web and your particular product, you can:

Some examples of the benefits are below.

Motivation

When product designers, managers, and other project stakeholders see people with disabilities use their product, most are highly motivated by a new understanding of accessibility issues. This helps get resources budgeted and scheduled to address accessibility well.

[[@@ alternative organization: 1. merge benefits section above into one section. 2. split below into two distinct sections: a. including real users to understand the issues, b. including real users in implementation]]

How to Involve Users throughout Your Project

This section focuses on including real people in the process. Note that accessibility considerations should be addressed even earlier in the project; really from project inception so that accessibility is considered early in project planning, budgeting, scheduling, and such. [[@@ for example, Incorporating Accessibility Early and Throughout]] Accessibility should also be included in your user-centered design processes (UCD) or other design methodologies and techniques; for example, ensure that the use cases, user analysis, personas, scenarios, workflows, design walkthroughs, etc. include people with disabilities and older users.

[@@ document is broad to cover many scenarios, incuding technical specification developers and policy developers; however, the steps below address website development. let's discuss issues with this. ]]

Below are the basics that you can do yourself to include users in developing a website. The steps are similar for other types of products. If you have the resources, consider getting assistance from accessibility, disability, and user-centered design specialists.

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. See Getting a Range of Users and Working with Users below.
  3. Early on, learn about general issues. 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. Later, when you are considering a specific 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.
  5. 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. Ask lots of questions.
    For more in this, see Involving Users in Web Accessibility Evaluation, especially the sections on Analyzing Accessibility Issues and Drawing Conclusions and Reporting.

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, for example, 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.)

Working with Users

Follow common practices for working with people informally and formally, for example:

If you are new to this, learn about research ethics [[such as The RESPECT Code of Practice]] and Interacting with People with Disabilities.]]

Combine User Involvement 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 projects cannot cover the diversity of disabilities, adaptive strategies, and assistive technologies. That is where accessibility standards come in.

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.

Examples of Benefits

Including users in the development process helps you more efficiently develop accessible websites that work well for people.

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.,

[@@ explain better@@] 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.

[@@ edit above if leave]]

Terminology

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.