Monthly Archives: April 2011

WWW 2011 – Trip Report [#accessibility #a11y #w4a11]

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WWW 2011

WWW 2011, Hyderabad, India.

As you probably already know, this years slightly confusing (thinking of the Web4All co-located conference) www theme was, yes you’ve guessed it ‘Web For All’:

The Web has had a glorious existence of over two decades and has revolutionized the way we work and live. It has been the catalyst for proliferating information across boundaries, enabling effective communication and 24/7 service availability all leading to a digital, information based economy that we have today. Yet, its direct influence has reached a small percentage of human population. By virtue of being hosted in a growing developing country, bubbling with innovation, this year’s theme aims to highlight the need for expanding the horizons of the Web to become all inclusive and pervasive, reaching out to every human life.

So you will understand my anticipation of a web conference specifically themed with a focus to users. Now it seems to me the organisation did a good job of promoting this inclusive theme across most of the unread or read paper tracks there was yet again no work in the human factors/ web ergonomics domain. As I decried in last year’s trip report from WWW 2010 interaction is dead at the Web conference and this view was yet again supported by the offerings at WWW 2011. It’s easy to be critical so instead let’s discuss the solution.

What is the problem? I think that it is mainly the error of spreading topics across existing tracks and seems to be why we have no human factors work in this years or last years conferences. Everything in one track means ‘like is reviewed with like’; spreading them through tracks means that like is not reviewed with like and probably with less expert reviewers. Indeed, the Human Factors community is notoriously hard when reviewing it’s own work – with a tenancy to `eat its own young’ so mid scoring HF papers will not compare well with more leniently reviewed papers from other domains. I think this means we need a ‘Web Ergonomics’ track which would bring together all the Human Factors work happening on the Web under a broad science and engineering umbrella and would cover:

  • Usability, interactivity, and accessibility;
  • Adaptation, personalisation, and transcoding;
  • Perception, cognition, and behaviour;
  • Evolution and emergence – in the context of human factors;
  • Browser, user agent, interface, and widget research and design;
  • Web ethnography and emergent behaviours;
  • Advances in Web technologies when applied to human factors; and
  • User specific methods, techniques, protocols, languages, formats, and tools.

In general anything at the intersection of Human Factors and the Web. I see this as an all encompassing Human Factors on the Web track – so everything from ‘simple’ User Agent research to understanding emergent human behaviour on the Web. So we would see it more like WWW+CHI+UIST+UX. The problem with HF is that there are few strong HF/Web research groups explicitly and most work seems to be distributed across research groups who are focused on other things.

The problem is that most groups see CHI as the premier conference, and more likely to accept their work because of the very low HF acceptance at previous Web Conferences – indeed their submission deadline is before the WWW’s and their notification is normally after the WWW submission deadline has closed. Social Sciences and Anthropology do not really submit to WWW as it is more expensive as a conference than they are used too – hence the WebSci conference (and even then when the fees increased after the first conference they lost these submissions). The good news is that this just leaves technical submissions from CS/HF groups looking at the Web – if you like – people who do this work as a primary focus and not as an offshot of other work – making a defacto cohesive community; which (our lab) have called Web Ergonomics to try and foster an inclusive but technically strong community of people focused on this area as their primary research domain.

And…

Just as a point of clarification (because people have told me ergonomics is sociology!) ergonomics isn’t a social science subject – it just means human factors – indeed it is really applied science / engineering and well known as ergonomics in mechanical, civil, aerospace engineering and the like – and is all about understanding technology and conforming it to people:

An ergonomist is an individual whose knowledge and skills concern the analysis of human-system interaction and the design of the system in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance.

W4A 2011 – Trip Report [#accessibility #a11y #w4a11]

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Looking from a Tuk-Tuk en Route Downtown

Looking from a Tuk-Tuk en Route to Downtown Hyderabad

This years W4A was yet again a triumph, especially Bebo White’s ‘Geezer’ – doing William proud for this second Memorial Address!

Now, normally I pick out a few technical papers which I think pretty good, however, departing from convention I decided to summarise each paper, both technical and communication, in as near to 140 characters or two sentences as possible. In this way I hope that anyone interested will be able to quickly understand the gist of the paper and use this understanding to decide if they want to read further.

  1. Development And Trial Of An Educational Tool To Support The Accessibility Evaluation Process. Christopher Bailey; Elaine Pearson
    Which web content accessibility checkpoints can be easily and accurately validated by novices?
  2. Developing Hera-ffx For Wcag 2.0. José L. Fuertes; Emmanuelle Gutiérrez; Loïc Martínez
    Implementing accurate validation algorithms for Web content accessibility guidelines version 2 is more difficult than you may imagine.
  3. On Web Accessibility Evaluation Environment.s Nádia Fernandes; Rui Lopes; Luis Carriço
    In-browser evaluation tools are the way to go for AJAX/ARIA validation and repair.
  4. Augment Browsing And Standard Profiling For Enhancing Web Accessibility. Silvia Mirri; Paola Salomoni; Catia Prandi
    Micro personalised transcoding based on user preferences at the browser side.
  5. Application Of Content Adaptation In Web Accessibility For The Blind. Pauli P.Y. Lai
    Audio Web browsing via a phone with indexes to content linked to an overview. Also see IBM India’s work on the spoken Web.
  6. An Adaptive Videos Enrichment System Based On Decision Trees For People With Sensory Disabilities. José Francisco Saray Villamizar; Benoìt Encelle; Yannick Prié; Pierre-Antoine Champin
    Crowd sourcing for video subtitling.
  7. Estimating Dyslexia In The Web. Ricardo Baeza-Yates; Luz Rello
    The words people miss-type are a proxy indicator of the number of active Web dyslexics.
  8. Accessibility At Early Stages: Insights From The Designer Perspective. Adriana Martín; Alejandra Cechich; Gustavo Rossi
    Supporting accessibility as developers build Web artefacts.
  9. An Integrative Accessibility Engineering Approach Using A Multidimensional Classification Of Barriers In The Web. Diana Ruth-Janneck
    Categorising the barriers to Web 2.0 accessibility may enable increased guidance to programmers.
  10. Accessible Icon Graphic Design In Enterprise Applications. Eric Stilan; Amy Chen; Lulit Bezuayehu
    What can be conveyed in an icon and how can it be made accessible.
  11. Crosschecking Mwbp For Visually Impaired Persons. Luís Carriço; Rui Lopes; Rogério Bandeira
    Combining accessibility and Mobile Web Best Practices for an accessible mobile
  12. Improving Accessibility To Mathematical Formulas: The Wikipedia Math Accessor. Leo Ferres; José Fuentes
    How best to describe mathematical formulas in Spanish.
  13. Accessible Qti Presentation For Web-based E-learning. Nathapong Luephattanasuk; Atiwong Suchato; Proadpran Punyabukkana
    Accessible e-learning in Thailand
  14. Wai-aria Live Regions And Html5. Peter Thiessen
    Test cases to assess the integration of live regions and html5
  15. Ajax Time Machine. Andrew Brown; Simon Harper
    Cycling back through automatically updated AJAX content is useful for both sighted and blind users
  16. Accessibility Approach To Adopting New Technologies. Neil King; Damien McCormack
    How accessible is PDF, even with Adobe’s accessibility hooks, not that accessible.
  17. An Educational Tool For Generating Inaccessible Page Examples Based On Wcag 2.0 Failures. Hend Al-Khalifa; Atheer Al-Khalifa
    Teaching accessibility by examples of bad practice using an auto generating example tool.
  18. Prediction Of Web Page Accessibility Based On Structural And Textual Features. Sina Bahram; Debadeep Sen; Robert St. Amant
    Machine learning techniques to understand the accessibility of Web pages, and eventually guide transcoding.

So these are my one line summaries for each of the papers, based on my notes and not solely on the views of the authors, the presentations, or the papers.

Of Chocolate and Human Factors

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Chocolate

Not All Chocolate Is Created Equal

My final week discussing Dix 2010 [1] which I covered last week, and the week before that too. Now lets:

imagine you have a group of children and want to give them lunch. In the UK you might well choose baked beans. Not the most exciting choice, but few children actively dislike baked beans; they are acceptable to everyone. However, give each of those children a euro (or maybe two) in a sweet shop … they will all come away with a different chocolate bar, the chocolate bar that is ‘OK’ for everyone gets chosen by none. Much of traditional HCI design is like baked beans – a word processor installed for the whole company, a mail program used by every student, good enough for everyone. However, increasing personal choice, especially for web-based services, makes design more like the chocolate bar; different people make different choices, but what matters is that the product chosen is not ’good enough’ for all of them, but best for some.

Now I’ve covered this in my 2007 paper discussion [2] and Dix has a very good point. I think that the salient point here is that systems run in a combinatorial way, where as individual findings can exist with minimal confounding variables muddying the waters.

Different operating modalities are useful for providing a personalised experience and a one-size fits all approach is not the way forward. Indeed, I wonder if universal design, or participatory design just encourage a product which is acceptable to all but desired by none.

References

  1. Dix, A. (2010). Human–computer interaction: A stable discipline, a nascent science, and the growth of the long tail Interacting with Computers, 22 (1), 13-27 DOI: 10.1016/j.intcom.2009.11.007
  2. Simon Harper (2007). Is There Design-For-All? Universal Access in the Information Society, 6 (1), 111-113 : http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10209-007-0071-2

Single User Studies Considered Useful

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Xerox Star and Modern Mac OS X Scrollbars.

Xerox Star and Modern Mac OS X Scrollbars (1)

What I hear you cry, “single user studies can’t be valid, even ethnography’s have more than one user”. Well that’s what I was saying before reading Dix 2010 [1] which I covered last week. The critical thing that Dix sees as different is that – and I’m paraphrasing and using my own terms here -  single user studies can be used to scope extent as opposed to our normal desire to support a point via a measure of magnitude of similarity across users; as a way of discovering out-layers as opposed to those which look like harmonise sample data; and as a way of disproving the rule which all the other sample data seems to support.

This discussion of single users data represents Dix’s main point – which is that we need new or modified Human Factors methodologies which are different from those borrowed from other domains, and which are valid and accepted within our field. We aren’t immature anymore, if we want to be treated as a grown up field then it is time we acted like it. I’ve spoken about the need for this before certainly as a journal publishing new and novel methodologies as well as datasets and validated results from multiple sources.

Dix also notes that when we do get it right, we ignore our fields previous work and start to reinvent the wheel:

…when one builds the justification of why something should work, the argument will not be watertight in the way that a mathematical argument can be. The data on which we build our justification has been obtained under particular circumstances that may be different from our own, we may be bringing things together in new ways and making uncertain extrapolations or deductions. Some parts of our argument may be strong and we would be very surprised if actual use showed otherwise, but some parts of the argument may involve more uncertain data, a greater degree of extrapolation or even pure guesswork. These weaker parts of the argument are the ideal candidates for focusing our efforts in evaluation. Why waste effort on the things we know anyway; instead use those precious empirical resources (our own time and that of our participants) to examine the things we understand least well. This was precisely the approach taken by the designers of the Xerox Star. There were many design decisions, too many to test individually, let alone in combinations. Only when aspects of the design were problematic, or unclear, did they perform targeted user studies. One example of this was the direction of scroll buttons: should pressing the ‘up’ button make the text go up (moving the page), or the text go down (moving the view)? If there were only one interpretation it would not be a problem, but because there was not a clear justification this was one of the places where the Star team did empirical evaluation … it is a pity that the wrong answer was used in subsequent Lisa design and carried forward to this day… [1]

So we don’t have novel methods, and when we produce reproducible results we just don’t use them.

References

  1. Dix, A. (2010). Human–computer interaction: A stable discipline, a nascent science, and the growth of the long tail Interacting with Computers, 22 (1), 13-27 DOI: 10.1016/j.intcom.2009.11.007