User Experience for the 100% - making your intranet accessible to everyone!
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What does accessibility mean to you? Paul Zimmerman, COO at Invotra discusses the importance of making your intranet accessible to everyone. You can see Paul delivering the presentation here: https://vimeo.com/190862301
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User Experience for the 100% - making your intranet accessible to everyone!
- 1. @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow User experience for the 100% Making your intranet accessible to everyone!
- 2. What does accessibility mean to you? @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 3. Accessibility definition: “The quality or characteristic of something that makes it possible to approach, enter, or use” Usability definition: “The fact of something being easy to use, or the degree to which it is easy to use” @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 5. Compliance or compliments? @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 6. AX Creating an “accessible experience” @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 7. Put yourself in the shoes of your users @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 8. Hear a recording of a screen reader at average speed: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5_cdTYp5wZoY2U1elIzUjNGOGc/view?usp=sharing Hear a recording of a screen reader at the top speed. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5_cdTYp5wZoVTl4MS1wSTRRMzQ/view?usp=sharing
- 9. How many words does it take to hear a page? @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 10. Ask your users to demonstrate it to you. @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 11. Whose responsibility is it anyway? @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 12. You can make your content better. @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 13. Content is king @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 14. Context is queen @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 15. Because of his role as the Commander in Chief of American forces in the Revolutionary War, and, later, the first President of the United States, George Washington is often called the "Father of his Country". Source: WebAim Alt Text help http://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/ @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 16. Because of his role as the Commander in Chief of American forces in the Revolutionary War, and, later, the first President of the United States, George Washington is often called the "Father of his Country". A. "Image of George Washington" B. "George Washington, the first president of the United States" C. An empty alt attribute (alt="") D."George Washington" @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 17. A. "Image of George Washington" B. "George Washington, the first president of the United States" C. An empty alt attribute (alt="") will suffice. D."George Washington" Because of his role as the Commander in Chief of American forces in the Revolutionary War, and, later, the first President of the United States, George Washington is often called the "Father of his Country". @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 19. What’s the experience for your colleagues? @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 20. Use some tools to tell you things: 1. Evaluate page-by-page? Use ‘WAVE’ 1. Evaluate your site + many more tools? See the W3 community (https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/) 1. Check your design (http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/) @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 21. Style over Substance? @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 22. Accessibility is for everyone @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 23. What else can you do? 1. Unplug your mouse, only use your keyboard 2. Try navigating using the arrow keys 3. Disable all styles to see the path of the screen reader (screen readers care about html) 4. Try it wearing boxing gloves or swimming goggles (thanks @SimonThompson) 5. Try it after a glass of wine (thanks @lisariemers) 6. Ask your provider awkward questions! @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 24. So what are WE doing? @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 25. Want to know more? @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow
- 26. @Invotra @PaulZimmerman #IntranetNow User experience for the 100% Making your intranet accessible to everyone! paul.zimmerman@invotra.com
Editor's Notes
- My talk is called “User experience for the 100%, - or - Making your intranet accessible to everyone.”
- We talk about our intranets being accessible. But are they? Compliant to AA standards? AAA? A site which can be accessed by all my users? Or at least most? Or at least most in HQ? Don’t the platforms do that themselves?
- How do people who cannot move their arms use your website? What about people who cannot see well or at all? Or people who have difficulty hearing or understanding, or have other accessibility needs? Source: W3C
- Here’s how the world of technology vendors define it - is it front-end, back-end, only, is it end-users. When was it created? Who created it? Why did it exist? Who were they trying to speak to? How often do they get modified/reviewed/changed? Why are we so reliant on this? As an industry… The standards outline 4 key aspects to ensure accessibility: perceivable (text alternatives to media, content that is meaningful, is it distinguishable) ; operable (can it be used solely using a keyboard? Is there enough time to complete actions? Prevent seizures by limiting flashing, is it navigable? ; understandable (is the content understandable - mainly for cognitive dysfunction, is the process of using the site predictable? Is there sufficient input assistance through labels, error identification, error prevention and help ; robust (can all user agents and assistive technologie use the site? Are the semantics of the site correct to achieve this?)
- We thought we were doing pretty well until we got our butts kicked by one of our customers. While we were technically compliant with AA standards, the experience wasn’t great. Some might say, shocking. We engaged with a W3C expert who rated us at 9/10 for effort and 6/10 for product, vs 3/10 for SharePoint. We held some focus groups to help us understand how our product can be improved for our customers, we went to meet with users that are blind and near-blind across the country in places as far flung as Preston, York, Blackpool and London. and we’re continuing to prioritise making it easier for our clients to make their intranets accessible to all. Don’t expect your provider to do this automatically.
- There’s a massive difference between ticking the box of compliance, and making a truly accessible experience for everyone. At Invotra when we took on the challenge of making our intranet platform truly accessible we spoke openly about this being an accessible experience, rather than just a user experience for some. In essence, we challenged ourselves to think of the experience of ALL of our users. Across Government this is a massive challenge where a significant number of our 200,000 end users have accessibility challenges. AX is a shift in the way we think about serving the needs of all of us.
- OK, we’re gonna have some fun now. On the tables you will find an eye mask - if you could slip it on, we will show you a snapshot of what we experienced.
- Imagine that you are looking to buy a birthday present online for a friend. Think about how would you do that? Pick up your phone/fire up your computer, but the screen isn’t on, or you can’t see. You open up a browser/search bar, but the website you’re trying to use is not accessible - keyboard focus jumps about, difficult to select links. Listen to this. Normal speed is 150wpm for the average user. Imagine this 3 x faster. It took us 30 seconds to get to... Play 100 x faster (or whatever the speed is Leonie would listen via) Jaws (at the upper limit) may be too slow for a power user. High-end users are exceptionally fluent. 400wpm is the upper bound of the most recent version of Jaws - the newer version of Jaws will actually be higher. How many words does it take to fill a page? How long does it take to hear a page? How do you find the right content on your intranet?
- Don’t just take our word for it - ask your users to help you understand the challenges they have. Visiting sites you may discover all sorts of issues, from the tech setup (out-dated browsers/OS, old monitors, flaky network connections, firewalls) to seeing how users with disabilities attempt to access your content. Do you have blind users in your organisation? Sit with people one on one and watch them. If users allow, set them up in a meeting room and video their actions and allow your other comms people to watch live. Hold a focus group. You’ll be amazed by the results. Different people use the same software in many different ways. When we were on site, we saw one person tabbing through everything, someone else using lists of content, someone else would find regions of the page - there are different ways of using a site depending on fluency.
- Ask yourself about a colleague’s trip to work. If you can make it easier, if you can improve that experience, do you really need to be responsible for it to make it happen?
- In many, if not most cases you have control of the content within your intranet sites. There are some great resources available (more later in this presentation) where you can read up on best practice (we’ll also be covering those in the workshop this afternoon).
- You’ve heard (and probably sworn by the adage) that content is king, but as far as accessibility is concerned...
- ...context is just as important… Imagine a colleague in a wheelchair comes into your building, and you tell them to turn right to the long hallway with stairs at the end, instead of left to the elevator. We talked last year about BIM and using Something that isn’t just a poor experience but actually *fails* standards - saying “select the link on right hand side” expecting a user to be able to see (it’s also terrible for responsive designs that display content in a different order!). Read more buttons… Search results. We had some challenges making our search results make sense when read out via a screen reader - we added “phone number” to the link, so that a user can hear that the list of digits is that number.
- OK, interactive time. Take a look at this picture of George Washington, along with some text. In this case, what should the alt text be?
- What should the alt text be in this scenario? A - Image of George Washington, B"George Washington, the first president of the United States" C An empty alt attribute (alt="") will suffice. D"George Washington"
- The answer is “D” - George Washington. We tried this out in our office, and four different responses! Don’t say it’s an image - that’s usually obvious (unless it’s a specific kind of image, like a painting, that’s relevant to provide more info). It says he was the President with contextual information. It doesn’t reference the picture of him in that text. There is no title next to the image/ There is no one right answer here. The best alternative text will depend on the context and intended content of the image.
- And if you think that was difficult, how might you display a pie chart on your intranet? (and would you want to? Thinking of contrasts, colour-blindness) Pie chart: 57% of those polled in our company did not get the answer right!
- When you say AA, what IS that? If you have a dropdown menu with 1000 items, how long do you expect a user to wait for their screenreader to run through that? You’d be compliant if you did, but the accessibility experience would be rubbish... There are many free and paid-for tools to measure/audit your site and quickly identify where to fix them.
- There are lots of tools available to help you understand how you can improve things.
- Turn off the CSS and look at the code on your site - how does it look then?
- Making your intranet easier to access for disabled users makes content easier to access for everyone. Tabbing gets easier. Images have more context. Links become easier to decipher. The experience is better for all.
- Overall we have changed our entire approach. And that starts with giving this subject the attention is deserves - internally as an organisation, AND externally with our clients. We ask the question in every release - how are we making AX better? We’ve renamed “alt text” to describe your picture. We working with experts that know more than us, too...
- Whatever your platform, Billy and Andrew show you how to take some steps to assess the state of your intranet site using free tools available, and what to do next when you have that information. We’re available over lunch if you want to swing by our stand and have a chat about what we’re doing to make your intranet more accessible.
- Thank you, and have a super lunch!