Draft in Progress 9/1/1998
Marja-Riitta Koivunen
The main goal of this report is to provide the companies developing new web services or web tools some insight of their customers' needs in the near future. Another aim is to help the web designers that build these services to understand the wide variety of situations in which users may use them.
It is easy to see that in many situations, the needs of the disabled users are not very different from anybody else. This comes from the increasing need to provide web content through different devices in various environments. For instance, there are often situations where some senses are impossible to use because they are already in other use or because the environment overloads them.
The selected scenarios depict needs resulting from restricted use of senses, cognitive processing, or limbs either because of environment or disability. The scenarios try to offer something that the readers are familiar with either when they think of their own life or the life of other people that they know well. The scenarios hopefully also help when thinking about the more unfamiliar needs of the users with different disabilities.
Kari is looking for a good videoconferencing system to be added to every computer in his company. He is about to make an order the next morning, but in the evening he hears from his good friend about still another new and interesting video conferencing system. When Kari comes home he checks the company's web page to find more information. The connection with the modem is slow. It seems like everybody is using the net at the same time. As he finally gets to the company's main page he wants to continue to search but the only thing he sees is a Welcome text and about a dozen little outlined boxes and one bigger one with no information on them. The alternative texts are apparently missing from the pictures. Kari gets frustrated. He waits for a while, but finally gets too tired and gives up thinking that the videoconference system is probably not good anyway.
Jeffrey is in the second grade at the local public school. They have a small class with both hearing and deaf students. Jeffrey is excited about dolphins and decides to do his homework assignment about their natural life. He goes to web to search some documents with the search engines and finds some interesting multimedia material. He looks at the video clip where the dolphins are jumping and reads the captioning synchronized to the video. The captioning is usually always turned on in his browser at home, but when he uses it from other places he needs to customize the browser manually or extract the settings by giving an address to his settings web page. The communication of the dolphins in the video gets Jeffrey really interested. He clicks the video to get more information on that subject but is not happy with the information offered to him. Therefore he stops the video for a while to go back and see the whole captioning text in one window. In this way it is easier for him to reflect the new issues and go and search additional information from the web. He founds videos that show the waveforms of the audio sounds while playing the sounds. Jeffrey smiles, this will be great addition for his presentation tomorrow.
Joanne has had a busy day at work and an if possibly even busier evening at home with her two kids, a three and a five year old girl. After she finally gets her children to sleep she goes to sit on the sofa and watch the CNN video news from the web. They are great as you can do it anytime you want and even go and get more or less info on a topic just by clicking the mouse. But now she just wants to relax and watch news someone has prepared. When the newsreader starts reading the girls start making noise. Joanne quickly presses the mute button and turns the captions on. Now she doesn't have to worry about waking up the children. As Joanne goes to see an old movie that is not captured manually, the voice interpretation plug-in in her browser will do the best it can in creating the captions. Not the same as manual captioning, but understandable.
Henry needs to find a restaurant for a his date tonight. He picks Ruth up from her home in Brookline and discusses with her shortly what they would like to try this evening. Ruth is blind so she always carries with her a hand held palmPC with GPS capabilities. GPS helps enormously when she is walking in unknown areas of the city and trying to find places. Furthermore, the palmPC is often a good icebreaker as most people are very exited about it. Henry and Ruth decide to search for restaurants within 6 miles from their current location and sort them according to the cuisine. The palmPC offers it's own data base of services and Ruth has added couple of more links to pages with restaurants in different areas. The query looks through all the data and creates a table as a result. Ruth asks it to list the found cuisine types and number of restaurants in each. As the Chinese restaurants are mentioned Ruth asks to stop for a while and filter them out, as they have been in so many of them lately. The rest of the data they run against Ruth's favorite RDF based restaurant rating page expanded with her own ratings to see where they can get good food with reasonable prices. The new nearby French restaurants looks like a good choice and they ask the palmPC to guide them there.
Maria is a freelance technical writer for electronic media working mainly at home. She decides to buy a scanner for her computer mainly to OCR pages. Maria goes to web to look some info from the electronic net stores. She has trouble seeing as she is getting older. Therefore she uses web audio reader with the visual info still turned on as it helps her to orientate. She asks the computer to go through the categories in her bookmarks list to find links to the stores she has saved earlier. She goes to one on the stores and asks the browser to find a page from the site containing search function. In this way she can immediately go and search for a list of scanners offered by the store without listening a lot of info. She marks couple of interesting scanners with a new annotation feature that lets her create links directly to any objects within a web page by using DOM and XLL. Then she goes to Altavista to search comparison articles of scanners. She finds a good article with a comparison table. She first listens the features, then the article writer's positive and negative comments and then orders the table according to the costs. After making her decision she goes to an intermediate net store site to search all the prices and stores that carry the scanner. As a results she gets yet another table that she navigates through with arrow keys and settles for a store she has used before. She fills in the order form which is easy as the reader stops and waits for her fill-ins before continuing reading.
William is a keen netsurfer. He has had quadriplegia since he was ten and the net gives him a lot of possibilities chatting with other people and changing opinions. Now he is exited as he is getting old enough to vote for the first time. Naturally, he wants to do it by himself on the net. He takes voting very seriously searching information on the candidates opinions, asking questions from them and attending videoconferences with live discussions between candidates and voters. He also looks information on pending legislation and commentaries on proposed government projects or regulations. Technically the most difficult part in the voting process is the identification of a person and still keeping the vote anonymous. The actual voting is easy. William first registers to vote by using voice recognition to fill-in a form. As a return he gets a special non-tractable code that he can use once at the actual voting. At the actual voting William is given a page with the candidates numbers, names and pictures with a link to additional info. When William selects a name the info of the person is shown once more and the system asks for acceptance. William replies happily YES and sees an immediate feedback thanking for giving his vote.
Kaisa is looking at new computer science courses at the Open University. She has a busy schedule at work that includes a lot of traveling. Therefore the courses on the web suit well for her. Furthermore, she feels that she can better reflect on the new issues and learn from the others while on the net. It does not matter so much where she is. The courses are well done, providing a lot of material in text, multimedia and web lectures. It is often possible to select if he wants to hear an auditory lecture while driving a car or sitting in on airplane or see a video lecture through the hotel TV connected to web. She has a little remote control with which she can mark difficult places or concepts on the lectures and easily return to them afterwards. The audio lecture offers some additional info of the slides or other things that are shown in the video lecture. The home work is sent by e-mail and often automatically checked. If she needs more info on a subject, she can contact a well trained human assistants via e-mail, phone or videoconference. Kaisa finds an interesting course on object oriented programming and decides to take it next, especially as the web service recommends it too based on the info it has on Kaisa.
Matthew is colorblind, he has a low vision and his field of vision is somewhat restricted. He goes to an ophthalmologist to check his eyes and get a new prescription for eyeglasses. As he works a lot with a computer he also needs to have a prescription for the web. The doctor carefully tests his field of vision to find out what is the best font size and column width for him for reading. All the colors are also selected so that they suit best to his type of colorblindness. All this is stored to a CSS style file that he can attach to the browser in his computer and then use it from anywhere else. The style file is set so that Matthew has two windows, one that shows the whole web page in small navigation window and highlights the area which is being read on the window specifically suited for Matthew's vision. Matthew also gets a CSS based looking glass application that he can easily use in inspecting other things in his computer screen.
Anna is working in a factory producing cars. The workers are frequently rotated to different jobs on the factory so that they learn new things and can do different jobs whenever it becomes necessary. Work rotation is very important as things often change rapidly. Anna likes it as it makes the work more interesting and she has more flexibility if one of the jobs are discontinued. To support the workers in their learning, a web based multimedia instruction system has been installed to the factory. There are screens and remote controllers hanging from the ceiling in every work cell.The instruction system shows the work phases of each job with still pictures taken from every work phase, video and synchronized text, which can also be listened to as audio. As Anna is working with a car engine she realizes that one of the parts have been changed to another type. She has some problems in fitting the new part to it's place. The factory floor where Anna uses the instruction system is very noisy so she cannot rely on hearing the audio. Therefore she always has the captions turned on. Anna browses to the right place on the instructions by clicking a forward button on simple remote controller. When in the right place Anna presses the play button. She sees that she was trying to put the new part in wrong position and that's why it didn't fit. She finishes the installation and pushes a button that asks the system to show the next change in the instructions. She wants to know if the part affects anything else, but the rest seems to be the same.
Sara is preparing a business report while she drives to work. She uses her car's computer to open the report she has been writing and to search for additional information to complete her report. Sometimes her whole attention is on driving and she needs to ask the computer to stop and go back a couple of sentences. She searches additional info by saying things like, read me the next ten links in the document, go to the next link connecting to a Xerox PARC site, find a picture about MIT, or find a paragraph talking about Marvin Minsky in the middle of the document. She can also search a certain place on a page by saying the 3rd paragraph or the second title or the two thirds point of the document. Sometimes she hopes the browser could allow her to mark a heavily used place in a document and attach a name to it just for her own purposes, but that is not possible yet. Her computer interrupts at various intervals to advise her of route adjustments to avoid traffic congestion.
| leaving time (Helsinki main station) | lines |
| 18.30 | 102 |
| 18.35 | 103, 192 |
| 18.42 | 109, 505 |
leaving time (Helsinki main station)
18.30
102
18.35
103, 192
18.42
109, 505
Figure: Time table in a table form and in a linearized form
Ville is a school boy who lives in Helsinki. He is going to visit her schoolmate who lives in neighboring town Espoo about 10 miles away. He walks towards a bus stop and looks at the same time for the schedule of the buses from his cellular phone. Ville got the phone as a present when starting highschool. It is one of the next generation phones that has a nice larger resolution but still a small screen. He selects an earlier stored web address from the phone's menu and goes to a page that lists all the buses leaving from Helsinki main bus station and going to his friend's house within the next hour. As tables are a bit awkward to read in the tiny screen of the phone he has set the table linearization attribute on. As a default the linearization shows all the cells in a row one cell after another. The cells can be also shown one column at a time. Ville can easily do it on the fly so that the currently selected cell remains as the starting point. Ville sees that he has either to run a little or he can shortly stop on the way to get a new computer magazine. He does the latter and takes the next bus.
Marja is writing some scenarios and tries to do it in an accessible way. She is uses the concept of table in many occasions in her life with or without computer, so this concept is easy to understand and use. Now she has a bus timetable which clearly is a table of data with two columns. She has done positioning of tables manually before, but nowadays she thinks computers should be able to take care of that so she just uses an authoring tool to create the table and fills the data to it. In addition to the time table, she has a linearized version of it. She wants to show both objects next to each other in one figure with the figure text under them. Thinking about positioning with the table concept is easy to her because dividing a page into sections for layout purposes often looks like a table. However, she goes to find out how to get the table effect by using CSS. It is difficult to find a good example from the CSS specification and the things that she tries out do not work very well. She finally decides to use float although the table is more near the conceptual model she has in mind than floating text. Even this simple thing does not work and she finds some CSS validation pages that she uses to see if the problem is with the browsers. She is right, the browsers don't support even float, not very well anyway. She goes to the page authoring guidelines to find out how to do a layout when the CSS approach does not work.
Timothy has been in a user interface design conference and learned about WAI page authoring guidelines. He is eager to give it a try. He starts from simple things like adding alternative text and descriptions to all the different objects in his current multimedia project. Alternative text seems to be the way to go until he realizes that not all the HTML objects have alternative text or long description attributes. How confusing to a designer! He needs to remember to do different things with OBJECT and IMG definitions and if he uses images within a FRAME he cannot add alternative text at all. Timothy sighs: "It would have been so much easier to remember to use the same attribute consistently for the same purpose with different objects."
The scenarios described here aim to give people ideas of users with their special characteristics and needs in various environments. More stories like this can be created, and new services brainstormed. From the WAI perspective an important step is to look at the scenarios in connection with the guidelines. In this process the scenarios can go to a little deeper into the actual interaction and the technical details. The story about Ville and the bus time tables is a step to that direction. In this way, the scenarios can be used as one way to test how well the guidelines for web pages, web browsers and web authoring tools support the activities that the users and designers may be involved with. The story about Marja creating the tables used in Ville scenario shows, how we can also do scenarios pointing out the designers goals and problems when using the guidelines.