PARTICIPANT KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE EXPECTED

Participants are expected to have a general knowledge of Web site creation and some basic understanding of HTML. Participants should be interested at some level in the evaluation or creation of Web products (sites or applications) for accessibility. Typical participants might include, but are not limited to Web designers or developers, quality assurance professionals, usability practitioners, and Web group managers.

GOALS FOR THE SESSION:

Participants in this tutorial will:

• Learn why making Web sites and applications/products accessible is important from not only an ethical standpoint, but also a competitive and fiscally successful business standpoint.
• Learn why relying on just checklists and automated tools for evaluating accessibility is not enough without the proper background knowledge on how users with disabilities will approach their Web products.
• Learn how users with different disabilities approach the Web in order to better understand how to design and evaluate for accessibility needs. In particular:
• What tools/assistive technologies users with disabilities utilize for Web browsing
• How disabled and non-disabled users approach Web based information and applications.
• Live demonstrations and video clip examples of how users disabilities browse the Web.
• Learn how to evaluate whether or not a Web site or application is accessible with significantly more accuracy than by using standards checklists and automated tools alone.
• Learn how to prioritize and assign severity ratings to accessibility issues discovered based on the context of the problems and the audience for the site or application (instead of by static checklist item severity).
• Discuss the dilemma of trying to meet everyone’s needs. What happens when the obvious or proposed accessibility fix impacts the design? It been said that accessibility should not be a limit on creativity, but a challenge to be more creative. How do we employ this concept in our work and team relationships? How can we satisfy all our user groups as well as our project managers, designers, and teams? Where do we fit accessibility evaluation and fixes into our project timelines?
• Consider and discuss the advantages and precautions of taking user-centered evaluation concepts further than just usability evaluation by increasing the involvement of users with disabilities in the development and evaluation process.

• A CD that includes:
• video clips of assistive technology demonstrations
• electronic copies of the presentation handouts and presentation material
• a demonstration copy of the JAWS screen-reader
• a simplified manual for using the demonstration copy of JAWS for evaluating for accessibility (includes commonly use key commands).
• training outline(s) to help participants share their new knowledge on accessibility with others at their own workplace
• exercises from the tutorial
• an example accessibility report checklist and template
• relevant resource links

PREVIOUS PUBLICATION OR USE OF THIS MATERIAL

The material to be used will be adapted from one of the presenter’s full-day and half-day workshops for developers and designers on accessible design (this material has been presented hundreds of times) as well as from training materials developed by presenter 2 to teach designers and usability practitioners how to evaluate their sites and applications for accessible use.

YOUR BACKGROUND IN THIS MATERIAL

Nicole Tollefson

Nicole Tollefson is a usability consultant and Web designer in the Web Development department at the University of Minnesota, where she has worked for five years. She has worked with the Web for over eight years. She wrote her department’s accessibility testing methodology and trains the designers and quality assurance professionals in designing and evaluating for accessible Web sites and applications. The department creates some of the most widely used applications at the University, including online registration (which is available to the over 30,000 enrolled students) and online pay statements (available to the over 15,000 staff). It is critical for the applications and sites from her department to be accessible because they are so widely used. If they are not accessible, the University cannot be an equal opportunity employer or provide equal education opportunities to its students.

Philip Kragnes

Philip M. Kragnes has served as the Adaptive Technology Specialist for the University of Minnesota since October 1998. He directs the Computer Accommodations Program (CAP) -- a joint venture of Academic & Distributed Computing Services (ADCS) and Disability Services (DS). The program exists to assist university students, staff and faculty with disabilities in accessing computers and information through the use of adaptive technology.

Mr. Kragnes received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Cognitive Psychology from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1987. He developed Carnegie-Mellon University's first disability services program and served as its director for a year and a half, while pursuing his studies at the institution. In 1995, he received his Master of Science degree in Experimental Psychology: Human Cognition, Memory and Learning from the University of New Mexico , Albuquerque.

HOW WILL THIS TUTORIAL BE CONDUCTED

There will be three major components to this tutorial: demonstration, hands-on exercises, and a group group discussion/Q&A. After an introduction to the topics, purpose, and goals of the tutorial, the first component will demonstrate, using video and live demonstrations, the ways that users with disabilities use a variety of assistive/adaptive technologies to access the Web. These user groups include blind users, users with other visual impairments, users with motor disabilities, users with learning disabilities, and users with hearing impairments. The second component will be a group exercise in which the participants will split into small groups of five or less and complete a small Web application evaluation. They will then look at the issues they find and play different project team roles (i.e. project manager, designer, usability/quality assurance, user, helpdesk, etc.) to negotiate appropriate solutions to the problems they discover. The last component of the tutorial will be a group discussion of the exercise outcomes and how to apply skills and solutions from the exercise to the real world.

TUTORIAL SCHEDULE WITH TIME ALLOCATION

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF TUTORIAL

The tutorial will begin with a brief introduction to accessibility and why it should be important to any organization that produces Web-based information and applications. This section will include facts and case studies that illustrate the benefits of accessibility in competition, customer satisfaction, buy-in of a user group, and edge in a market.

The presenters will then follow with a description of the premise of the tutorial. The presenters have found that in their experience working at a large University, where it is critical that Web applications (such as registration online, staff pay statement online, etc.) be accessible, familiarity with standards, checklists, and automated tools is not enough for Web development organizations to produce applications and sites that disabled users can access..

One of the presenters directs adaptive technology assistance university-wide. The other presenter a member of a university department responsible for creating many of the most widely-used sites and applications at the University (e.g. registration which is available to the approximately 30,000 students, and pay statements online which is available to the approximately 15,000 staff and faculty). She is in charge of assessing the accessibility of these applications and providing feedback and assistance to the designers to help make them accessible. In these roles at a large institution, the presenters have both found that development teams equipped only with knowledge of standards and automated accessibility tools are not able to produce applications that disabled users can access. The presenters have consistently found that teaching development teams about how disabled users access the Web is much more useful to the teams. Teams with this kind of background knowledge and a set of simple guidelines to help them make sure they are thinking about all disabled users are overwhelmingly more successful at creating Web sites and applications that disabled users can access than are teams that are even quite familiar with the accessibility standards and automated tools. This part of the tutorial will include specific examples and before-and-after case studies that illustrate the difference in an application produced when a designer just knew the standards and the improvement of the application after he/she learned what the presenters will teach in the tutorial..

Following the introductions to accessibility and the tutorial premise, the presenters will begin with the demonstrations of how users with disabilities use the Web. They will split the types of users into six groups for practical discussion purposes: blind users, color blind users, users with other visual impairments, users with motor disabilities, users with learning disabilities, and users with hearing impairments. There will be a discussion of each of these user groups, including a discussion of the types of assistive technology tools they might use to browse the Web (e.g. a screen-reader, screen magnification, speech-recognition, etc.), alternative Web-browsing techniques imposed by a disability and the adaptive technology in use (e.g. how blind users “scan” a page for important points since they do not have visual scanning convention available to sighted users), and a video example or demonstration of an actual user from one of the groups using the Web with an assistive technology.

The last user group to be discussed will be blind users that rely on screen-readers for browsing. The visual nature of the Web presents a variety of access issues for screen-reader users. Therefore, a full hour will be devoted to the issues for blind Web users. One of the presenters of the tutorial is blind himself and uses a screen-reader. He has done hundreds of demonstrations of using a screen-reader to aid Web development professionals in understanding how to make applications accessible to blind users. He is also in charge of providing assistance to disabled Web users at the University, so has not only his own experiences to share, but also the experiences of the users he assists. He will present his demonstration of a screen-reader (JAWS, one of the top two selling screen-readers available) for the group, share examples of common challenges on the Web for screen-reader users, and answer questions.

Following the presentation of the Web access issues for these user groups, there will be an overview of the materials provided for the tutorial. Included in the tutorial are a demo version of the JAWS screen-reader on CD, a template set of accessibility guidelines, a manual for using JAWS to check the accessibility of Web sites (including common key commands), an example report on the accessibility of a Web application, and some materials to help attendees bring the information from the tutorial back to their organizations (demonstration videos from the presentation of users with assistive technologies, an accessibility training agenda example, etc.).

The attendees will then be introduced to the group exercise that will follow the lunch break. Attendees will be asked to split into >groups of about five people each. Each group member will assume one of the following roles in a project team: a designer, a developer, a manager, a help desk/customer service representative, and a disabled user. The group will then be given a laptop with a Web site to evaluate together for accessibility (using the JAWS demo , tools provided, and the guidelines from their materials). They will write a joint report of the accessibility problems found. Then, assuming the roles of the project team, they will be given some background on their roles and some exercises to complete. For example, they will be asked to negotiate within the group how the problems are to be solved. The team may find a problem for which the obvious solution would require a developer and designer to reorganize the system. It’s a problem that would prevent the user from being able to use the site, so it can’t be ignored. The project manager knows the project is on a tight deadline so there is no time to use the obvious solution. The group will have to find an alternate solution that still satisfies the project deadline without leaving out the user or making the product less than accessible. The help desk person will need to be informed of the initial problem and the solution. Does the team decide it’s important enough to push the timeline back? Does the accessibility solution create new problems for visual users? Can they find a creative solution that satisfies the project manager and the user? What kinds of communications and information need to be passed amongst the members of the project team?

The attendees will have two hours following lunch to complete the exercise. After the exercise, the rest of the afternoon will be a discussion of lessons learned from the exercise about implementing an accessibility process within an organization. The discussion will focus on points important to the attendees, but will be structured enough to touch upon particular items with case studies such as how to involve the users in development and evaluation of an accessible application, and how to balance accessibility, usability, and project timelines.

TUTORIAL MATERIALS

Take aways:

• A CD that includes:
• video clips of assistive technology demonstrations
• electronic copies of the presentation handouts (agenda, outline of activities, exercises)
• a demonstration copy of the JAWS screen-reader
• a simplified manual for using the demonstration copy of JAWS for evaluating for accessibility (includes commonly use key commands).
• training outline(s) to help participants share their new knowledge on accessibility with others at their own workplace
• exercises from the tutorial
• an example accessibility report checklist and template
• relevant resource links

Materials for the printed packet:

• Agenda of the day’s activities
• Outline of topics
• Exercise explanation and questions
• A hard copy of the JAWS manual
• A hard copy of an example training outline
• A hard copy of the example accessibility report and template
• A hard copy of the relevant resource links