RE: Lists inside nav necessary?

Thank you, Alastair, for the excellent review and details.

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-----Original Message-----
From: Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com> 
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2020 6:46 AM
To: Steve Green <steve.green@testpartners.co.uk>
Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: Lists inside nav necessary?

Hi Steve,

You asked:
> How much user research is done prior to the creation of the WCAG success criteria and Understanding and Techniques pages? Is any of this research available for review?

In the development of WCAG 2.1 there were three task forces did wide ranging reviews of the available research in order to create requirements  / gap-analysis documents such as:
https://www.w3.org/TR/low-vision-needs/
https://www.w3.org/TR/coga-gap-analysis/ 
https://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-accessibility-mapping/

The user-needs identified in this work drove the success criteria development in 2.1, and to a large extent in 2.2 as well.

When you are considering research there is a range of types and no-one type will give you all the answers, for example:

Academic research: Tends to focus on relatively low-level factors like thresholds of vision or  the ability to remember a task. These almost never give you a direct answer to whether a particular design approach will work, you have to work up from the principles involved to capture the user-need. It also tends not to be publicly available, so the summaries above are useful.

Project research: Tends to be very focus on a particular product/site, use small numbers of participants and the results probably don't apply to other sites with different contexts / designs.

The other big factor I'd throw into the mix is that people's experience with the current state of the web has a big influence on their expectations. E.g. do regular users expect 2 links to be in a list? Or, if websites generally put navigation at the top, that might make sites which take another approach less usable even if their approach is more effective (for people without that expectation).

From a WCAG point of view, we take in all of the above. Some members of the group do lots of project-based usability testing which they can draw on in aggregate to inform their view. Some have personal experience, some have academic experience. Knowledge of the platforms, user-agents  and technology involved is also an important factor.

With all that in mind, we then try and work out if there is something we can identify about the *content* that is an obstacle to people with disabilities, and go through a process of refining that criteria.

Unfortunately, that means if someone asks about the research, it is rather hard to point to specific things apart from the documents above.

I hope that helps,

-Alastair

Received on Friday, 19 June 2020 14:05:58 UTC