- From: david poehlman <david.poehlman@handsontechnologeyes.com>
- Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 10:27:24 -0400
- To: <tina@greytower.net>, <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
which is why I posted it as a sense of the beat. We have a long way to climb and I've been tooting this horn for a long time now and I keep having to duck magic bullets. Johnnie Apple Seed ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tina Holmboe" <tina@greytower.net> To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org> Sent: Saturday, August 21, 2004 9:12 AM Subject: Re: Fw: Accessibility humanized On 21 Aug, david poehlman wrote: > Accessibility humanized > A user-centred approach to web accessibility [snip] > possible: "A bad website in terms of accessibility." Our blind > accessibility tester evaluated the site with his screen reader and was fairly > pleased. He praised the site for being well-structured and didn't find any severe > accessibility problems, though he had problems here and there. While This is indeed disturbing - but, in my view, from a different angle than the article author probably intended. I would like to know what the blind accessibility tester - let us call him NN - evaluated - the overall probability that user X, regardless of ability and equipment, could get to the information he/she required, or how well *NN* could get to the same information with his abilities and his equipment ? Those two issues are vastly different. We can only speculate, as we do not have access to either the test methodology or the raw data. Did NN, for instance, use equipment he was accustomed to, configured as he prefers it ? Has he, subconsciously, taught himself how to compensate for site problems ? Did he focus on only his own disabilities ? Did he test for other peoples physical realities ? If so, how ? These questions are part of why it isn't necessarily a good idea to automatically trust the "blind accessibility tester" any further than the "acessibility expert", and why user testing can give the entirely wrong results. This article, as a whole, is fairly disturbing to me. It would take more time than I have currently to refute it. -- - Tina Holmboe Greytower Technologies tina@greytower.net http://www.greytower.net/ [+46] 0708 557 905
Received on Saturday, 21 August 2004 14:26:52 UTC