It's Not User Experience Unless You Are Considering the Experience of All Users
For us here at Accessiversity, May was all about pushing the current and future boundaries of accessibility.
Whether it was launching our new video tutorial series which will feature accessible video content made entirely by individuals with disabilities, demonstrating the benefits of having blind and low-vision testers complete immersive QA testing experiences to improve the overall accessibility of products/processes, or engaging with other accessibility thought leaders and visionaries to ponder the future of learning and work while exploring those technological advancements and promising best practices that are contributing to more accessible and inclusive environments for students/workers with disabilities – when it comes to finding new and creative ways to leave our print on a more accessible world, we here at Accessiversity pride ourselves on being the exception, not the norm.
Central to all of this, the foundation on which we have built out our philosophy of recreating an authentic accessibility testing experience, is the end user, specifically, individuals with disabilities who often rely on screen readers and other assistive technologies to access their digital content.
In fact, when you think about it, there is quite a bit of overlap between accessibility and usability, and for good reason.
For example, often times we are able to identify problematic aspects of client web sites that might not ever get flagged as technical accessibility issues, but through this user-centric process we are able to show the customer how making a change to their design will improve the overall usability of the site for all of their users, including individuals with disabilities.
It’s why I’ve made statements in some of my past blog posts like “focusing on accessibility will make your web site or system more usable for all of your customers” and why, when consulting with new Accessiversity clients we often advise them to begin addressing the accessibility of their web site or system by focusing on those two or three most important use cases, those things, that above all else, they will want to ensure their customers, all of their customers, including persons with disabilities will be able to do to access their products and services.
And of course, it’s why we advocate for utilizing individuals with disabilities to perform “live” (manual) testing, such as the types of immersive testing services we are able to offer through Accessiversity, to provide for an “authentic accessibility experience” because at the end of the day, it's not user experience unless you’re considering the experience of all users.
Lights, Camera, Action
In partnership with our friends over at Good Fruit Video, we released the first installment in our new Accessiversity video tutorial series, the aptly named “Introducing the Accessiversity Video Tutorial Series.”
One of our goals is to make these videos as accessible as possible by featuring captioning, audio descriptions, voiceovers for graphics, and other interactive elements like using the screenshare feature with the computer audio to simulate a screen reader user’s experience.
And it’s worth pointing out again that these videos are being made entirely by individuals with disabilities!
In addition to Good Fruit helping with post production – doing some light editing, adding in and syncing captions, that sort of thing – we will also be utilizing a number of special guests who will be providing voiceovers to some of the graphics that appear throughout these videos. For example, our first video features a voiceover by Lee Thomas, Television Journalist & Entertainment Reporter for Fox 2 News in Detroit (thanks again Lee for lending your talents to this project and for continuing to be such a vocal champion for disability awareness!)
If you haven’t already done so, please check out the video and the accompanying blog post, “Do Good, Be Fruitful” to learn more of the backstory about this partnership between Accessiversity and Good Fruit Video.
As you check out the video, make sure to turn on captions to get the full experience—and be sure to stick around all the way to the end for Lee’s guest voiceover work which serves as an example of how to provide audio description for the information appearing on the acknowledgement slides.
Also, do us a favor and hit that “Like” button, and while you’re at it, why don’t you go a step further and use the “Let’s Chat” web form on our Knapp Strategic website to send us a quick note to let us know what you think about these new video tutorials.
Immersive A11Y Testing
On May 20, we celebrated Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2021.
As it so happens, it was also the day that the Lansing Area Software Testers Group invited me to present my Experience Report about exploring the accessibility of products/processes as part of their regularly scheduled monthly online meetup. Well, I couldn’t think of any better way to celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day than to have this great opportunity to talk to a group of local testers about my own immersive testing experience with the Sakai Project.
In case you weren’t able to attend the online meetup, check out my blog where I summarize my presentation. Since I prepared the outline for my talk using the Experience Report format, I thought I would follow that same basic structure for this blog post.
My thanks to the Lansing Area Software Testers User Group for providing me with this platform for discussing some accessibility testing best practices, and an extra special thank you to Jess Lancaster, QA/Software Testing Practice Manager for TechSmith, who serves as one of the moderators of the group, and helped me to prepare my presentation.
Accessibility, Inclusion and the Future of Learning & Work
We wrapped up May by going “back to school” (so to speak) when along with one of my colleagues from the Sakai Project, I attended a virtual accessibility conference hosted by the University of Guelph.
We will be reporting out about our experiences more in the weeks to come, but here are just a few of my initial take-aways from the conference.
First, this was an extremely well put together 3-day event with lots of great information spread out over 30 concurrent sessions, bonus workshops, expert panels, and the keynote CAPSTONE presentation.
Second, despite being a completely virtual event, I’m still counting this as my first official international conference.
Third, after 2 days of listening to (predominantly) Canadian presenters, I realized that us Americans have been pronouncing the word “process” wrong this whole time (it’s actually pronounced “pro-cess” – not “pra-cess” – which now that I have heard them say it a few hundred times, makes complete sense…)
Lastly, the diverse lineup of speakers, informative presentations, and engaging group discussions that highlighted several innovative practices helping to make higher education and the workplace more accessible for people with disabilities, naturally made me think back to my own experiences completing my undergraduate studies at Michigan State University during the late nineties. Well, when it comes to digital accessibility, and higher education, and this continually evolving online space at the intersection between digital accessibility and higher education, it goes without saying that much has changed in the past 20+ years, a lot of which, of course, has been for the good.
On one hand, part of me is envious of this current generation of students. I can’t help but wonder how much different it would have been if schools back then would have had Learning Management Systems for delivering virtual instruction, or how much easier completing my college coursework would have been if I would have had access to a smartphone, or auto-transcription software, or these powerful apps that can perform OCR (optical character recognition) scans of documents, signage, etc. in real-time.
But at the same time, even with all of these technological advancements that have come about since my prehistoric time on campus, it’s the benefit of hindsight being a former student with a disability, coupled with my unique perspective and cumulative professional experience that now includes working as an accessibility consultant in the higher ed space, that tells me there is still much more that can be done, which we’ll delve into deeper as part of some upcoming blog posts recapping some of our key take-aways from the University of Guelph’s virtual accessibility conference.
So as we look to close out May, and usher in June, as we recognize the important and critical relationship between accessibility and usability, it’s worth repeating…
It's not user experience unless you are considering the experience of all users.
During last week’s virtual accessibility conference hosted by the University of Guelph I attended a presentation about the ARRM (Accessibility Roles & Responsibilities Mapping” framework. The person who was presenting was using this little racetrack graphic with exit ramps to represent these “checkpoints” that you would turn off of to assign the various responsibilities of the product life cycle to different roles, things like business owners, content authors/publishers, visual designers, user experience, developers, Testers/QA team, etc. She had these little Lego guys for the different roles which were depicted as drivers, pit crew, etc. which made me wonder, which Lego guy applies to me? As a blind QA tester I would obviously fall into the tester/QA team role, but as an accessibility consultant, I realized that I really touch all of these different roles at different points throughout each phase of the project, so I’m there in the car with the driver, in the pits with the crew chief, everywhere. Well, as hard as it might be to believe, I couldn’t find any good images of blind Lego race car drivers, so I found the above image of some blind Lego guys, one who has a guide dog, and another who is using a cane, so these will have to suffice.