RE: Personae

Agreed
You don't want a comprehensive set of personae.  Too many.

But if you only have 3 for low vision, you could leave color perception
problems completely off the list.    People not knowing better could think
that they understood the range and not even know about the dimension.   

That is all I was trying to warn against.   I have seen people with as few
as 6 personae representing the range of disability... without mentioning
that this was just a small sample of the types, degrees etc. 

 
Gregg

 -- ------------------------------ 
Gregg C Vanderheiden Ph.D. 
Professor - Ind. Engr. & BioMed Engr.
Director - Trace R & D Center 
University of Wisconsin-Madison 


-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of Joe Clark
Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2004 9:43 AM
To: WAI-GL
Subject: Re: Personae


> Personae are great.   But you need a lot of them to cover the great
variety
> of disability type, degree, onset etc  that represent the variety of
> abilities and skills of these different users.

No. By definition we're not trying for maximum inclusion; personae are
models. We merely need a reasonable cross-section of WCAG 2.0 target
groups. Personae are an adjunct to other methods of usability testing and
are not the sole such method. If you leave a certain category out of
personae, you can test for usability for that category elsewhere.

Merely as an example, it would probably be overkill to produce six persone
for colour deficiency (protan, anomalous protan, deutan, anomalous deutan,
tritan, and the one everybody fixates on that's almost impossible to find,
achromat). One would probably suffice in order to model issues of colour
deficiency.

--

  Joe Clark  |  joeclark@joeclark.org
  Author, _Building Accessible Websites_
  <http://joeclark.org/access/> | <http://joeclark.org/book/>

Received on Thursday, 18 March 2004 23:02:54 UTC