Helen Petrie Centre for HCI Design, City University London, UK

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Helen PetrieCentre for HCI Design, City
UniversityLondon, UK
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Introduction

• A formal investigation conducted on behalf of the
  
• Disability Rights Commission of Great Britain
• Results and recommendations are being considered
  at the moment, so I cannot discuss these today
• I will present the aims and methods of the
  research and give a few suggestions about results
  and the path to greater accessibility of the web
  for people with disabilities

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Aims of the formal investigation

• Establish the current state of accessibility of
  the Web in Great Britain using the WAI
  Guidelines
• Establish current problems encountered by people
  with disabilities using the Web
• What needs to be done to make the Web a more
  usable and useful resource for disabled users

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Phase 1 Consultations with stakeholders

• Public meetings with different stakeholder groups
  interested and affected
• organizations of and for disabled people
• web developers
• businesses with web sites
• public sector organizations
• Follow-up questionnaires to each stakeholder
  group
• Survey of web site owners (66 questionnaires / 25
  interviews) and web developers (23 questionnaires
  / 26 interviews)

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Phase 2 Investigate current accessibility and
usability issues

• Established User Panel of 50 disabled people -
  wide range of relevant disabilities, age, gender,
  experience with technology and Internet,
  assistive technologies used
• Identify accessibility/usability problems
  currently encountered
• Focus groups
• individual interviews
• sessions using the Web, explaining the problems
  encountered to a researcher

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Composition of the User Panel

• 54 people in total
• 10 blind
• 9 partially sighted
• 12 dyslexic
• 12 deaf and hard of hearing
• 10 manual dexterity problems
• 35 men and 18 women, age range 18 to 72
• Wide range of computer/internet expertise,
  different assitive technologies used
• For other relevant disabilities - we are
  consulted with experts (Alzheimers disease,
  epilepsy)

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A few highlights from the focus groups

• Blind and partially sighted people have quite a
  lot of difficulty with their assistive
  technology, need more support to get the most out
  of the Web
• Deaf and hard of hearing people have difficulty
  with forms -entering phone numbers, wanting to
  explain their disability
• Everyone has problems with navigation,
  particularly bad for blind people (knowing where
  you are, where you can go from here)

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Phase 3 Automated testing

• How well do web sites conform to current
  accessibility guidelines?
• The broadbrush picture
• Automated testing (against the WCAG 1.0) of 1000
  home pages of a representative sample of web
  sites of interest to people with disabilities in
  Great Britain
• thanks to Watchfire for providing us with the
  software and assisting with this work

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Phase 3 Automated testing of 1000 sites

• Criteria for selection of the 1000 web sites
• Five main categories
• government/informational
• Businesses (SMEs to multinationals)
• E-commerce
• Entertainment
• Web services ISPs, portals, search engines, chat
  rooms etc

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Phase 3 Automated testing of 1000 sites

• Criteria for selection of the 1000 web sites
• Sub-categories as many within each key category
• studied portals such as yahoo, msn, firstsites
• Suggestions from user panel
• Produced about 75 sub-categories
• C. Range of popularity ratings from Alexa

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Phase 3 Automated testing of 1000 sites

• Tested home pages of the 1000 web sites
• many interesting results!
• Selected the 100 web sites for more detailed
  testing on the basis of a number of accessibility
  metrics of the 1000 web sites (top, bottom and a
  range in between)

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Phase 3 Automated testing of 1000 sites

• Automated testing of accessibility of whole sites
  (or first 500 pages if larger) for the 100 sites
• 39,000 web pages tested
• Organizations will be offered their test results
  after the FI research is finished

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Phase 4 User evaluations and expert inspections

• How well do sites conform to current
• accessibility guidelines?
• The detailed picture
• Detailed testing of 100 web sites, representative
  selection from the 1000 sites tested at Phase 3
• User evaluations and expert inspections

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User evaluations

• First session at our lab, with researcher next
  to the user,
• Procedure free exploration,
• 2 set (site specific) tasks
• questions (rating scales, open ended),
  (classic usability testing)
• Evaluated 2 - 3 web sites this way

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User evaluations

• Users then used the same procedure in their own
  time at home, office
• evaluate 7 - 8 other web sites
• each member of the user panel has evaluated 10
  web sites in total
• 80 return rate
• 913 user tasks analysed

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Some initial highlights from the initial user
testing sessions

• Dyslexic users
• Text needs to be in small chunks
• Be consistent in use of text fonts/size within
  the site
• Multiple frames pages hard to concentrate on
• animations - very distracting, can they be
  stopped?
• text which is actually graphics is hard to read

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Some initial highlights from the initial user
testing sessions

• Blind users
• Insufficient and inaccurate ALT texts
• Avoid links which are actual urls - link should
  be meaningful text
• Including a link to the page you are on is very
  confusing when you are using the list of links
  option (common with blind users)
• Labels on fields in forms not easily associated
  with the correct field, leads to entering data in
  wrong field

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One of the most interesting outcome of the
research

• Comparison of automated testing and user
  evaluations
• Very interesting results, again I cannot give
  details yet
• But I can say that web developers need both
  automated testing and user evaluation - neither
  by itself will give accessible and usable web
  sites that will provide a positive user experience

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• However, evaluations with people with
  disabilities will definitely have a side benefit
  - they will create web sites that are more usable
  and more appealing to all users

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Further information about the FI

• www-hcid.soi.city.ac.uk/rhDrc.html
• h.l.petrie_at_city.ac.uk