- From: Scott Luebking <phoenixl@netcom.com>
- Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 12:05:20 -0800 (PST)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Hi, I recently posted this note to some general mailing lists on HCI or web and have been asked to write a couple of articles for the HCI world. Let me know if you have feedback on the web page design or comments on the issue of usability. Thanks, Scott ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi, Yesterday, I dropped by the Berkeley campus to look at the projects done by the students in the undergraduate HCI course during the semester. (They did a great job setting up the event including a small buffet and even an expresso bar. Can't help but wonder what they do for the graduate course project presentations. <smile>) The professor spent a part of the time discussing the key aspects of the course and then various student projects were presented. Through the event there was a strong emphasis on "ease of use" as one would expect in this type of course. After talking with the various people attending the event, I started thinking more about the ease of use issue when I got home. I've been running into an interesting contradiction of values in a project I've been working on concerning designing web pages. Basically, I've been looking at what might a web page be like if it were being designed just for a blind user with the goals of efficiency, ease of use and accurate understanding. After watching and interacting with blind web page users for a couple of years, I was coming to the conclusion that three useful features, outside of not including images, would be a very linear presentation of text (no columns unless needed for data tables etc) in order of importance as determined by the information / semantic content, a means to get an overview of the main semantic groupings and a means to quickly move between the semantic groupings. As an informal experiment, I took the results of a query to one of my favorite search engines and rewrote the page incorporating these three aspects. (The example pages are at http://members.aol.com/criptrip/dynamic_web_pages .) Almost all of the feedback confirmed my suspicions that web pages structured along the semantic aspects I discussed could significantly improve efficiency, ease of use and accuracy of understanding. While discussing the web page design with some of the blind users, a number of them were unclear about what semantic structure meant. Like probably most sighted users, they were unaware of the subtlty that when information is put into HTML, for the most part, the semantic aspects become unrecognizable to computer technology like browsers, access technology etc. Computer technology can perform syntactic transformation of the web page HTML, but are much more limited in performing useful transformations in the semantic dimension. A surprising aspect was a number of blind people who commented on either not wanting to use web pages designated to be designed for them or preferring to use the same web pages as sighted people. These comments often came after saying how much easier it was to use the web page incorporating the semantic features with their access technology. More than one blind user commented that they were concerned that people might think they need special accomodations in order to get something done. Another type of comment was a concern that they wouldn't be getting the exact information as sighted users. (This seems somewhat unclear because many blind people often use alternate material like braille or sound recordings.) Because of these types of beliefs, some blind users would probably be willing to sacrifice efficiency, ease of use or accuracy of understanding. Scott PS In case someone was wondering, I didn't delve much into blind users' views of the National Federation of the Blind's lawsuit against AOL.
Received on Thursday, 9 December 1999 15:15:56 UTC