Re: involving end-users (was Re: [urgent] input from WAI Coordination Group on mobile accessibility pre-cal)

Hi Shadi, All,

On 11 Mar 2012, at 14:04, Shadi Abou-Zahra wrote:

> I think the term "end users" is a little vague and jargony but may be useful to consider at this stage.
> 
> 
>> I am not sure about this. If people just start to talk about their experiences, the webinar will have a different focus. I though the overall idea is presenting "research" results. Therefore, there could be papers that talk about user studies where users are disabled web users. However, I do not see how end users or people with disabilities will directly write a short abstract to present their experiences. To me that is something completely different. There can be webinars that end users get together to discuss their experiences but that is not a *research* webinar :-s
> 
> Why shouldn't we invite the people for whom we are doing research for, to better understand the real challenges? Why can't this be scientific research if we set it up correctly?

End users can be invited to attend the webinar, I think there is no problem with that. However, if they will be invited to submit abstracts then that will change the focus of the webinar. In my opinion, talking about personal experiences is not research. There might be research papers/abstracts that present findings of user studies though. 

If you want to research experiences of disabled users, then a different webinar can be organised where individual contributions are accepted. However, in the current format mixing both, I think is not a good idea. In that case, it should not be called "research webinar"!

> 
>> I strongly support all Simon's remarks. Especially this one "Adding 'people with disabilities,' is just plain wrong....it suggests we think people with disabilities occur in a set by themselves and not as part of the R&D community - this is wrong and discriminatory!"
> 
> I think it is more about specifically inviting the end-users that we are talking about. We can debate the wording and approach but claiming that this is "just plain wrong" is quite harsh towards other opinions.

As I wrote above, mixing both does not make sense to me. 

Regards,
Yeliz.

Received on Sunday, 11 March 2012 20:44:07 UTC