RE: Personalisation - your thoughts please

Personalisation only works when users have some sort of attachment to the
site. For instance a bulletin board site where by its nature many of its
users would spend a lot of time on the site and frequently come back.

For any other site it's simply not worth the effort of setting up
personalised features.

Most sites that have personalisation are kidding themselves in thinking that
users are "attached" to the site, and guilty of portal-era hubris.

If your site is of a kind where personalisation is worth the effort to your
users then I would be wary of making accessibility options part of that.
However I can see a point in using personalisation to do something that
would make the site less accessible when the user explicitly asks you to do
so through the personalisation mechanism. Personalisation of this kind can
be used to enable a feature that makes the site more accessible to some
while less accessible to others (can't think of an example here, but I can
dimly remember a few ideas people had on this list for aiding one group that
fell down because they damaged accessibility elsewhere).

Also some personalisation techniques work with someone's accessibility needs
without being accessibility features per se - for example your site should
always work without graphics being displayed, but specifying "I don't want
graphics" would allow you to reduce download time to those users.

Received on Friday, 19 April 2002 08:24:52 UTC