EOWG Minutes 16 July 2003 Meeting

JB: This is Education Outreach working group. We talk about and work through docs. WAI done through W3C. Four domains. Activities with chartered working groups or interest groups. Chartered to address certain types of work. EOWG awareness, training materials. Active in promotions and training. Exchange of info. Wish list – good idea but not now. Deliverables list. Resources Suites – several page resource.

JB: Agenda today – Two resource suites: Web Accessibility Training – old resources suite; Building a Case for Web Accessibility. Then user-centered design of WAI site. Worked through in past, stop for a while. A year ago, revisited the topic of user-centered design. Building a Case for Web Accessibility - I suggest we start with that.

JB: Agenda review for 17 July. Additional people coming --- 26 with two more cancellations. Training Demos.

JB: Project that encompasses 24 organizations, include some technical assistance development on access and evaluation approach. Is there some interest here?

JB: Let's discuss at lunch. How many people have an Ethernet port and want to be connected?

Building the Case for Web Accessibility Resource Suite

JB: Go to http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/bcase/soc-new.html. Switch and display from off-line and walk us through it. Start working on some substance. Orientation to the suite. There are 5 pages in all with suite. The first is an overview page. Purpose is to look at a range of arguments for doing accessibility and be able to select from those rationales something to help them in there organization. Often use several rationale. May want to take a social responsibility position but have to take the strict monetary business case. We give a number of factors to look at. Trouble putting into a framework that works. Recently used these. William did a rewriting of Andrew's writing. Principle of tersification that William invented.

JB: Hope that we can look at the orientation/attitude of this page to see if it feels right. Apologize that this revised draft was not available prior to the meeting. Let’s see if this material makes sense.

JB: Orientation section. That is new. It is the whole social factors case in one chunk. Provide why we are calling out social factors. Is this approach that different folks would understand in different circumstances? Tried to smooth out the language – be careful about claims we are making.

JB: Took out from earlier edits “older people suffering from a wider range of impairments”.

JB: One of the things we were saying was a problem was that we were not telling people how to use the suite. So we tell them how to use it.

JB: Sections ...Previous drafts a lot of detail. Too technical just have the explanation for...

JB: Charmane’s strong point to have employees. I demoted it but maybe should have its own heading.

LK: I like what has been said. The method that I see in this paragraph presents what is going to be coming. Social responsibility - importance to access to the Web. Putting out as if people understand it. Maybe we should put out why is this important. Normalization for people for people with disabilities. Using the concept of usability design.

JB: General reaction? Problem we always have in this working group. Our documents are part of a network. Train ourselves to say when we want to broaden a definition we look at where we have already done that and link to it. Bill did provide links to how people with disabilities use the Web. Link to it from here.

LK: Point to the definition. Otherwise, come to the document and haven't a relationship understanding.

HBj: I like what Bill said in the first and second paragraph. “This document…” either have them in the same paragraph or change the verbiage. In general in social responsibility, you don’t know if social responsibility is the same in general around the world. In my country, we talk a lot about social responsibility but it is in relationship to employment, taking care of the old workers and the retirees. I don’t know if we will be able to make a case for social responsibility around work. Don’t think that is likely.

RL: Big thumbs up to the bullet points. The link to disability should go to a definition - What disability means.

WL: In all the work we do, there is a tinge of elitism. Express an audience that is talking from top down. Need to get the attitude that this is a document to use not just to read. There is not a group of people in white coats that will create this. Can accessible be cool? The attitude that pervaded - "Poor unfortunates" rather than major players

WL: Key elements if language is different, this facilitates that. Causing groups to talk to one another on line. Different than broadcast, a conversation. Allow people to talk to each other - where a blind person could talk to person who is deaf. That is not in our social responsibility section.

JB: Using the wrong concept for the whole section. In reframing be careful about creating a charitable frame. Just say social factors not social responsibility. Would it work? How does that fit into a business case?

SLH: A lot of people will have a limited focus. Note that this is not the only factor but it is one of the concepts.

SAZ: Feel audience is a bit missing. In social responsibility, are we talking about the corporate. Maybe we should try to bring out a bit more who the audience is of the Business case.

JB: It could be many: corporate, NGO (non-governmental organization), university...

SAZ: Why should I implement accessibility for employees, other end users, customers, businesses, and other audience that may need to access this site.

JB: It goes back to Doyle saying we should be splitting public that access the site and employees that have to access to the site.

MK: Steer away from social responsibility. Promoting interactivity not the passive use of things. How this will connect people so they can share and communicate. Industry thinks social responsibility already but, if we talk about additional people who can be part of their conversation or people in another organization.

JB: Been talking with organizations about parts that give them motivation to do Web accessibility. That is what drives it already. Have to position self. Already have Web access.

MK: Larger companies have funds to do this but smaller companies need to meet budget. Customizable kit part of what we put on this page or just part of it. Company said we don’t need. We understand that. Maybe we need to find a place to say both. Some believe universal design is not possible so they hear those words they shut down.

NL: Use social responsibility lingo. Have a link to the social responsibility. Have a definition and link to that.We are trying to eliminate the digital divide then access to employees. i.e. connecting everyone to the power of technology and building a foundation for universal access to basic technology. Access for employees.

LK: Clarify where I was going with that include phrases like social responsibility not a problem but I do think the point that Mimi was making and others…maybe social responsibility… you don’t know who you are making this for so why not make it so everyone can use it? Making the case that there are people who access things in different ways, there is a way to do that.

JB: Maybe a paragraph or two to do this. This is a dart board. Don’t take it as anything other than that.

DS: Agree that social responsibility will be a subset of this. Section 508 and large corporations, the ADA are not strictly about social responsibility, rather policy and law. Nice to have it in there but it helps to establish the larger framework.

MK: Universal access and put social responsibility as a subset of that. Have a concern that if you put social responsibility people won’t click on that. Some aversion to this. Federal law if they want to sell with the Government then the follow Section 508. Goes to the states. Do not think that most companies in this country think about social responsibility. They are just trying to make payroll.

JB: I talk with people from Fortune 500 companies that say social responsibility is what has got them over the hump. One thing might be interested in and then they look at the legal and tech. The are amazed at the federal entities. They have found that Section 508 is not enough but they have found that social responsibility helped move them forward. Let's take the people in queue and then look at one or two or at least the first section.

ML: Large corporation social responsibility… sponsorship establish metrics for the efficiency of human to human interaction. ROI (return on investment). Socially that is where we are lacking HR (human resources). Web stuff what is that? Web people building HR related things but there is no input coming. What kind of efficiencies can you have when your site is translatable. Have some efficiencies. Contact management system. Internally a lot of people.

JB: Talking about the technical factors are in the other parts of this resource suite.

ML: There is an efficiency that can be gained here, and here, and the social responsibility. How do we justify, retrain several.

ML: The social part is not yet distilled enough. A cloudy vision won’t help us. Sharper vision will help us.

JB: Let’s keep trying. The translatability needs to go into the technical factors. make the distinction between internal vs. external - split the public and the employee.

HBj: This is not a US (United States) paper. This is international where the social factors are very important. Don’t build on the legal claims but we do have a strong case no matter the size of the organization. They have a responsibility to the community. The reason we came up with the social factors is because people said the economic factors were not strong enough. Therefore, what is there beside the bottom line? You have a social responsibility and the social factors with the community. We have forgotten about the environment. We should not damage the environment. And we have other social impacts on how we have to be able to use this in Europe, US and Australia.

WL: Song and Dance. If everyone put in bullets to the document, I will volunteer to read and comment on them. Most important. Societal as well as social. Social is just one aspect of responsibly – blame.

PG: I will translate social factor. Would use more citizen factors: How Web accessibility can help people be full citizens, full civic participation? If you don’t do it, be the bad guy so they will do what we want. It is regretful that we have to be careful to say.

SLH: The whole document a tool that people we can pick and choose. The document is not intended to be given as the business case as is, but take the points needed and then flush it out for my organization. This will facilitate that. If they want social responsibility, they will pick it out.

JB: Agenda - stay in this discussion and do the User Centered design to after lunch, Slide some items off the discussion. Do two things: Briefly look at the framework of the suite again, feedback on the intro to the social page.

JB. One of the other things not done much is the overview page. Change from original framework, start talking about main subpages. Then would give an idea of how to combine these for a particular business case. Had material that gives idea of how to emphasize some sections. Mix and match. Orientation of how to build business case. These copies don't link properly. Still, can do updates to this copy of cover page. Economic factors, question and answer approach. ROI (return on investment) approach. Technical factors document. Worked over but needs more smoothing and editing.

JB. Back to social factors document, which we discussed earlier. We had made comments about how to recast introduction. Describes area by area. Access for people with different disabilities. Look at previous online version, lot of detail. If we like the detail we can bring some of it in to new draft. What is the level we want to aim at here? Level of detail in this section by section.

WL. Policy document doesn't reiterate all policy bits, just links. The bit about 10% of population can link. Framework with bullets and links to statistics. Instead of being in this. This is very different to others. Need to get them all consistent.

SAZ. Worried about contents; links to such detailed level of information. May raise transition costs. Like to see links to relevant information. May be better to include list of references at end.

WL. About potential audience, thing is that when user is looking for way to present business case, needs a portal to detailed information. For users who already know a lot about it. Where can I find detail?

SJ. Agree with you. In paragraph on people with disabilities; very detailed. Should be list of bullets.

JB. One thing is access to services and information (for public sites) but not why it's important. Access to Web through adoption of guidelines. So general, neutral. Some people may not need this orientation first.

HBj. Take care not to make it too much hypertext; people may get lost in documents they don't understand.

JB. Extraordinarily difficult to do internationally. So we decided not to do page of demographics. Is presently unsubstantiated.

RT. Georgia tech has this information. Is very important here. We shouldn't leave it out.

HBj. We don't want to put up statistics, because you see figures are not that high. In Denmark the blind say it's not just about the number of people. It also has wider benefits.

JB. I think Helle says we don't need to leave it out, but that it has wider implications.

PG. Thinking about how I can translate that into French. We say people with impairments, which means a big difference as it may be a temporary disability. Affects the scope. Not only the percentage of blind people, but many more people. Helps a lot in justifying accessibility.

LK. We have done work on statistics. To make a point about these areas, you do need to emphasize statistics. Don't want to avoid this issue. Internal and external references. Should reference papers about it?

JB. We have decided not to include links to off-W3C sites in a page like this, but use a separate page that we can update more frequently. Thought of doing a demographics section that way.

LK. I'm not sure how strong the case is without statistics. If you have to present to a board of directors, for example.

DS. In Wells Fargo we don't actually track disability statistics. Is a problem. Statistics help correct problems. Research at MIT on attention deficit user interfaces. Without statistics it's hard to discuss seriously.

JB. We've discussed at length; statistics tracking. Difficult, so we decided not to include demographics. Adopt a minimalist approach here. Emphasize the idea behind it. Based on what I'm hearing, seems nobody's opposed to leaving it out.

JB. Social factors. General reaction I hear to first paragraph is that it doesn't work that well. For comparison here's what we had in March. Miss out "ubiquitous"; doesn't translate well. Try to find William's draft. This section has long bullets and uses Andrew's intro. Trying to do it shorter, but hearing good reactions about how it looks. Is not right approach. Not what people want. Not right yet but we know why.

JB. [Shows auxiliary benefits tables on projector.] Social responsibility included in table. Detail is above in page. Interesting way of organizing information. Some people liked it some didn't.

CC. I think trouble is the seven subheadings (social factors document, new draft). Formatting is the problem. There's a heading missing. Before additional resources. Would read better if there was one heading for employees.

JB. My impression when we were reviewing it together is that people don't grab it at all.

CC. Do the social factors change with category? If not you can use a general overarching paragraph.

CC. Social responsibility can apply to all and so it can be pulled out into a common paragraph.

JB. So one approach is umbrella statement to say ensure that site meets needs of all audiences. I started by assuming the umbrella statement. William is that new in your draft?

LK. I think that in each of your categories you've got the initial statement, and the population groups, and then each audience's needs. Actually have some of that, access to government info, entertainment. Could be enough.

JB. Biggest task is to build the umbrella statement. Then something about why universal design benefits them.

CC. Explain why each group is included. As opposed to some other group. We're not saying this is all the groups.

JB. Introduction is brutally shortened. Bullets. Social responsibility as a hook. ... Who is and how it relates to accessibility. Comments? Discussion?

HBj. Easier to continue discussion after someone has drafted the document the way you describe. Would be much easier.

ML. Outline we're talking about user groups and stakeholders. Distinction between user groups and what actual impairments may be or accessibility barriers. Distinction between internal and external audience. Specific impairments. If cognitive or physical, some are applicable and some aren't. Distill everything into a core message.

JB. Are you suggesting trying to create a segmented business case? It doesn't work, but I've heard it said. Unified business case tied to the guidelines.

LK. Maybe I can clarify. I have list of categories. Older people can be a significant part of disabilities.

JB. In papers on digital divide, it's frightening the way they ignore disability. Huge overlap with disability categories. Don't think we can arrive at clear-cut groups.

MK. Michael expresses things I was trying to describe. Economic effect of disability.

JB. People often not thinking about disability issues. Umbrella should say that disabilities interact.

JB. Glad we went into more depth on this. One thing I take away is to expand umbrella, expand categories and interactions, and see how it works out when we do individual sections.

JB. When we come back, we should go right into user centered design. During afternoon break talk about training presentations tomorrow. Work on training resource suite later this afternoon.

User Centered Design (UCD) of WAI Site

JB. Two years ago we did a site redesign, but it wasn't systematic. Wanted customized access for different audiences. Last summer, July 29 and 30, we discussed in Toronto how to do a UCD approach. February in Boston, we discussed what to do, need for people to do different parts of the process.

SLH. Want to give overview of UCD, then specifically talk about project proposal for usability testing of WAI site. Documents from last March F2F. UCD also called Human Centered Design in Europe, and also customer-centered design. Multidisciplinary area. Many resources available. Lots of resources online. Process with very specific techniques. Ensure that the process includes audience, tasks, workflow. Iterative process. Meeting in March got interesting feedback. Have organization interested in doing usability testing of WAI site at no charge, and provide input to process. Any questions?

WL. Overall question from outreach point of view. Has accessibility community reached the usability community?

SLH. Short answer: I have been giving presentations for a few years and reception is good.

JB. Site has grown out of contributions by individual members, with little overall coordination, except for few guidelines. Role of WAI EOWG is to lead work in this area. In March had participation by other groups.

PG. I used to work in a Web design company and know importance of usability. Are we going to create guidelines that combine usability and accessibility?

SLH. Couple of answers. Not in scope of WAI EOWG. Mimi has project that integrates. There was a group of people that wanted to start usability WG within W3C. We should keep in contact with the other initiatives.

PG. More and more questions in France from Web design companies asking about accessibility, want method to avoid wasting time, ask for checkpoints during design phase.

MK. We are going to put materials on the Web for designers. Issue of integrating users with disabilities into testing procedures.

SLH. One problem with doing full-blown UCD, including personas, is the time. I used to do UCD before starting in accessibility, but now there's not enough time, either mine or this group's. Need to minimize time and maximise benefits.

SLH. In March we talked about setting up a task force, to devise proposals for the group to review.

SLH. Very few formally, the link to submit comments is at the bottom of the page. There is an archive, but it's very small.

JB. There are many more comments than go to the archive. We've tried a number of experiments for the design over the years.

SLH. There are many people waiting to try. But we need to be more formal, systematic. Create usability tests to help identify and quantify the problems and strengths of the current design, and provide benchmarking of the site. The people volunteering to do the work will do the usability testing quite formally in facilities equipped for the testing. Eight participants. Not enough to allow any quantitatve statistical analysis. In last teleconference there were lots of ideas. Let people in other countries conduct the tests, for example. Lots of wonderful ideas, and we hope to do some of them, but we have to temper the scope because of the resources available. Are there any questions about usability testing in general?

RT. Some people say that 6 to 8 people is good, but more than that and you get diminishing returns.

SLH. What we have to do today is to talk about that. Some of the things we have to put in the pre-test questionnaire? What tasks do we want the participants to complete? For example... find resource on site. Host test questionnaires, about their site in general. Determine the characteristics of the participants. Who do we want these participants to be? Particpant screener. First topic is: we've got eight slots, who do we want in each?

ML. First we need a Web development person. Within that, someone on the business side, and someone who does coding.

SLH. The company that will do the testing is in Massachussetts. We have people in the UK and Australia interested in this. Save time and energy to be able to do tests in other languages and countries.

MK. Important, but as this company is donating their resources, perhaps a recent immigrant or visitor to this country could satisfy the requirement, or does it have to be someone not related to US culture.

SLH. How much effort do we need to put in to ensure that some test participants are not American or americanised?

SAZ. I have found that in Europe, Web sites tend to be organised differently. If it is too American, it would be a problem.

MK. But if we use someone who is native to other country but lives in US, could be OK.

PG. Vocabulary: when I first saw "authoring tool" or even "education and outreach" it was confusing.

LK. People in other Web development areas. Someone who is responsible for Web accessibility

CC. Either a secretary or executive staff assistant, as they are often called to find out about things for boss. On my campus, for example.

ML. The representative for accessibility in a company, who was initially in charge of Web for. People we have to think who we are designing the site for.

SLH. Absolutely. The site was not developed following formal UCD. All deliverables are done in response to needs of users. List of deliverables is updated every quarter. There was a list but I can't find the link.

SAZ. Management, decision makers. Not developers, but who have some ownership of the site.

HB. In government sector, people who are setting up contracts with design companies. So they know what to ask about.

SLH. A range of people, with a range of skills with authoring tools. Who we want and the task, we have to ensure that the people can't find the info on the Web site. Choose people and tasks that we think are important.

HB. Different countries have different criteria. More international tasks. For example, find a country's legal requirements.

SLH. We have to look at prioritising and overlap. One of my questions is people with disabilities. Different profiles. Would all the users have disabilities? Material for people with disabilities, advocacy, etc. What are our goals in terms of requirements and range of disabilities. Let's be more specific about the disabilities represented in the eight users.

DS. Visual impairments, motor disabilities. Test: that a visually impaired person can understand things fairly easily and not get lost. That parts of site like tables are OK.

CC. Since we are testing usability and not accessibility, we should perhaps minimize the number of disabilities represented. Agree with DS that visual is important, though. Do accessibility testing later in development.

SLH. There is a difference between usable accessibility and technical accessibility.

NL. The idea is to give the disabled user the same experience as the others, and until you test you can ever tell.

SLH. How does organization affect user test? How important is that in terms of usability testing? If we have users from different types of organisations are those people going to interact with the site differently?

SAZ. I think the expertise is important. Managers look for one type of information, developers for other, not only because of the size.

DS. Disagree. For example in financial industry, in big company even a financial manager will be aware of issues, but in a small company no.

SLH. Depends on experience of user in company. Everything we want must be included in screener.

SLH. Yes - navigation, design, layout, information architecture. Not content. Old site.

WL. If we decide that this is about usability. We don't necessarily need specialist users. Unless dealing with content, not just structure.

SLH. To summarise last discussion: Important is variety of experience levels, not of organisations.

HB. Some of the organisation, would be very similar, whether they come from central government or local government. Should include private enterprises and disability organisations. People in disability organisations have different viewpoint.

NL. We need to talk about the navigation and not the content. If we talk about roles, we are talking about content.

HB. Structure is very closely related to this. If we look at navigation and structure, we need to look at different backgrounds, and what is this site presenting. Structure very important.

SLH. Leads us nicely into talking about tasks. If we talk more about tasks, it will help us define the rest. I sent an email with the tasks. [shows on screen and explains]

SLH. With only eight users, not enough data. Dangerous to provide data with this number of users.

DS. A linearised table. A visual user would have it easier, but a blind one finds it difficult.

LK. Different people, different levels of experience. Tasks. Some advanced, some novices. Find out what tasks each does, and base task on user's relationship to the site.

SLH. Hope to do the tests before, during and after, and show any improvement, so need structure. Will talk to people doing tests and ask their ideas.

SLH. Devise test to take that into account. Pages have breadcrumb trails. Test understanding of navigation mechanisms.

NL. Eight people are not enough. With heuristic studies, can be enough. If not going to publish results.

CC. So we need to decide what the objectives will be for the new design. To have comparison. So if we focus on existing design we need to plan now.

WL. Is there any literature to convince me that this is science and not superstition?

SLH. Any specific questions on defining the tests? In-page links. Specific questions about whether a design works?

SLH. Anyone heard of Bunnyfoot Universality? Use eyetracking and work with people who are dyslexic. Would be interesting to try.

SLH. We know there are problems with the site. Redundancy. We might ask someone where to find a list of resources.

ML. It's a result of the testing. Need to find out what users are trying to achieve.

DS. Idea of HB's. Invisible link to skip navigation bar. Find out how good the ALT text is.

SLH. Wrapping up. Will have smaller group to focus on this, then full group can review. Pre-test and post-test questions to review soon.

Last updated $Date: 2003/07/31 21:46:20 $ by Shawn Henry <shawn @w3.org>

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EOWG Minutes 16 July 2003 Meeting

Agenda

Attendees

Introductions

Building the Case for Web Accessibility Resource Suite

User Centered Design (UCD) of WAI Site