Category: UD and ICT

Writing Alt-text for buildings and architecture

A word poster in upper case with the heading of the blog post: How to write image descriptions for buildings and architecture.Alt-text is a description of an image that’s shown to people who for some reason can’t see the image. Alt-text mainly helps people with little or no vision, people who turn off images to save data, and search engines. So what should you write in Alt-text for buildings? 

As more people are getting the hang of writing alt-text, we are seeing a little more finesse emerging.  A recent blog post from Veroniiiica (not a typo) explains what to include when describing buildings and architecture.

    • The type of structure that is being shown, such as a house, church or monument.  
    • For landmarks, mentioning the name of the structure is helpful, such as the Space Needle or a building at a specific university
    • The general size of the structure – is it a small house or large skyscraper?
    • The colour and material of the structure, which is especially helpful for historical structures
    • Any distinctive features
    • Any text or relevant signs in the image

More specific details about building might include:

      • The size of the structure, such as the height or number of storeys
      • The city or country the structure is located in
      • The scenery and time of day, if it alters the appearance of the structure such as a night view or a rainy day
      • Depending on the reading audience, you can include the name or description of the architectural style 

However, this is not an exercise in prose so don’t try to include everything, but relate it to the accompanying text or purpose of the image. There is more information in the blog.  

If you want to learn more about alt-text and how to do it, have a look at two previous posts on this website: How to write meaningful alt-text and Every picture tells a story.

IBM Equal Access Toolkit

A graphic in purple indicating levels of design. There is a graphic of someone at a desk and other using a wheelchair.Make your product more usable by more people in less time. That’s a great aim, and it is the opening line in the IBM Equal Access Toolkit.  With many websites remaining inaccessible, this toolkit assists web developers and designers increase accessibility.  It comes with Accessibility Checkers and has reporting tools for accessibility conformance. 

Non-tech people should also have a look at this Toolkit especially if they are in charge of contracting a web developer for their website. Or when they update their website. 

There are five steps: Plan, Design, Develop, Verify, and Launch. The process inolves the whole team regardless of their level of expertise.

The Equal Access Checklist is where it gets technical and links to the WCAG2.0/2.1 Checkpoints. There are four principles underpinning the process.

    • 1: Perceivable – Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.
    • 2: Operable – User interface components and navigation must be operable.
    • 3: Understandable – Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable.
    • 4: Robust – Content must be robust enough so it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.

For an overview, G3ict has a media release explaining why this toolkit is needed. Accessibility is an issue that comes up in legal and policy discussions in many organisations. While many websites have improved their accessibility there is still a long way to go. It is worth noting that a new site might be fully accessible but as new material is uploaded, it isn’t always checked for accessibility over time. 

 

Involving users in evaluating web accessibility

A graphic with five yellow stars and icons of people in different colours.When organisations decide to refresh their website they usually focus on factors such as positive brand imaging and deciding what information is the most important. So the idea of involving users at any point can be a bit scary.  What if they want to change things? What if all our brand work is undone? Can we really afford the time to do it? 

The bottom line is that if you don’t involve users from the outset then your website will receive less traffic. Being willing to accept feedback, particularly on accessibility, gives all website visitors a good experience. And don’t assume your web designer has all this in hand. Very few home pages are accessible in spite of legislation requiring this.

The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative has a toolkit to guide web designers AND organisations through the process of involving users.  The toolkit includes a one minute video of why designers should include users from the outset. The material is focused on users rather than technical aspects. It helps avoid some of the pitfalls and at the same time improve general usability for everyone.

The toolkit is extensive and each section is downloadable separately. The title is, Involving users in Evaluation Web Accessibility.

 

Customer Engagement by Universal Design

Front cover of the toolkit with three overlapping circles, bright pink, purple and turquoise.Communicating effectively with customers is essential for any business or government service. And right now, online communication is taking centre stage. 

The new guide for Online Meeting Accessibility is a supplement to the Customer Communications Toolkit for Public Service. It takes you through the steps of planning and conducting an online meeting, and following up afterwards. The focus is on accessibility and inclusion with many helpful tips.

The Customer Communications Toolkit for Public Service covers planning, training and informing staff and contractors. It takes a universal design approach and is useful for any organisation. Also in PDF format.

The Centre for Excellence in Universal Design has two more toolkits  for private and public entities. They are guides to effective and inclusive communication using a universal design approach. 

Customer Engagement in Tourism Services Toolkit covers best practice guidance for customer engagement using case studies. The four sections cover business objectives, written communication, face to face, and web communication.

Customer Engagement in Energy Services provides best practice guidance for customer communication. In four parts it covers: written form, face to face, telephone and video.

The Centre for Excellence in Universal Design has many more resources on the built environment, products and services and technology/ICT.

Online learning: does it work for everyone?

Online learning is not new for many higher education students and teachers. Accessibility of online content is improving but there is still a way to go. Students with hearing loss are at a greater disadvantage than many others. Hearing loss is not something you only get as you age. Many young people aren’t even aware they have a hearing loss. An article in The Conversation discusses the issues and provides links to some resources.

Students with hearing loss rarely speak up about it, so lecturers will never know who is missing out or how many are missing out. Regardless, all students learn better with captioning. There are some myths about the cost of captioning. Yes, before Google and YouTube developed Do-It-Yourself captioning, it was expensive to get videos captioned. But times have moved on. However, live captioning with a stenographer is another matter.

The title of the article is, How to help students with a hearing impairment as courses move online. It has good, easy to do advice.

If you want more tips on making sure everyone is included in videoconferences, have a look at the previous post, Videoconferencing: Zoom in to hear. 

Why make your podcast accessible?

A graphic with a headset and the word podcast.There are at least two reasons to make podcasts accessible. First, they reach more people, and second search engines like it. It’s the same reason why descriptions of images are important. Both reasons help grow your audience. A third reason is that transcripts help you to find the content at a later date. If you have transcripts for every show, you can search and reference what was discussed on your show at any point. In essence:

It’s the right thing to do
People with disabilities benefit
Other people benefit
You benefit – Your content is indexed
Your reach increases
There may be legal requirements

The Podcast Accessibility website has more detail on the list above about making podcasts accessible and why it is important for everyone. It also has other useful information apart from transcripts. It’s an easy read.

Social factors and accessibility

a man stands in front of a wall covered in bright coloured post it notes which have different ideas and actionsSocial factors influence how people with disability choose to use their technology. So they are sometimes disadvantaged because they don’t want to be “different”. Design for Social Accessibility is an approach that encourages designers to focus on social as well as functional factors in their designs. 

Using a workshop method, researchers worked with designers to bring about a change in their attitudes, and to see the effectiveness of the Design for Social Accessibility approach. The results are published in Incorporating Social Factors in Accessible Design. It is a lengthy read because it includes quotes from workshop participants and the reporting is very thorough. They conclude that accessible design is within the reach of professional designers if given appropriate tools and resources. Designing technologies for people with disability does not exclude people without disability. The focus of this study is on people with vision impairment. However, the principles are applicable to the design of any product or place. The article is open source.

Abstract: Personal technologies are rarely designed to be accessible to disabled people, partly due to the perceived challenge of including disability in design. Through design workshops, we addressed this challenge by infusing user-centered design activities with Design for Social Accessibility—a perspective emphasizing social aspects of accessibility—to investigate how professional designers can leverage social factors to include accessibility in design. We focused on how professional designers incorporated Design for Social Accessibility’s three tenets: (1) to work with users with and without visual impairments; (2) to consider social and functional factors; (3) to employ tools—a framework and method cards—to raise awareness and prompt reflection on social aspects toward accessible design. We then interviewed designers about their workshop experiences. We found DSA to be an effective set of tools and strategies incorporating social/functional and non/disabled perspectives that helped designers create accessible design.

 

Videoconferencing: Zoom in to hear

Nine people are shown on a computer monitor.Online communication is great for staying connected, but it is not kind to people with hearing loss. A great blog post gives some excellent tips that everyone should consider when using Zoom. You just don’t know who in your group is finding it difficult to hear.

There are two main issues: One is clarity of speech due to inadequate microphone, sitting too far away from the screen, background noise and/or the echo from the room (like the bathroom sound). The other is the delay between sound and vision so lip reading is impossible. And of course, talking across each other because of the transmission delay.

The blog post, Making the Most of Zoom, explains how the features can be used to best advantage for everyone to hear what’s going on. For example – how to change the video layout so that the active speaker is the largest view to make lip reading easier. Using the chat facility, lighting, muting when not speaking, and using the wave-hand function to get heard in turn. While this is focused on Zoom, many of the tips can be applied to other online apps and programs. There are links in the article to other resources and Zoom information.

You might also be interested in The Conversation article, How to help students with hearing impairment as courses move online. 

Designing software with adolescents with autism

Two male adolescents sit on the kerb looking at the phones.With the right supports and understanding adolescents with autism can make a significant contribution to software design. Applications for people with differing needs is a challenge for designers. So going directly to the users and working with them is the best solution. An Australian study did just that and found that once participants felt safe they readily engaged in the workshop activities. Participants also learned from their input and engaged with the iterative design process. The agreed overall goal of all stakeholders was to devise a platform where adolescents with autism could interact and socialise. Designers usually start out with goals in mind, but they used an open-ended approach so that participants could explore their needs to determine their goals for the software. The outcome was a co-designed app for smartphones and smartwatches. 

While this article is about software design, the processes and learnings are relevant to other design disciplines. The article uses the term “Autism Spectrum Disorder”. However, the notion of autism being a disorder is challenged by many people with autism. The article is titled Co-designing with Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder: From Ideation to Implementation.  It is open access and the researchers are based at James Cook University.

Abstract:  Most co-design-based Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) research is conducted with children and does not involve the participants directly. Studies have shown that people with ASD can take on the co-designer role in early phases of the software design process. We present a longitudinal study that investigates how adolescents with ASD participate as co-designers in an iterative software design process. In this work, we conducted seven co-design workshops with six adolescents with ASD over eight months. The team exchanged ideas and communicated through group discussion and drawings. Our findings suggest that: (1) parents, community group and fellow participants play a pivotal role in supporting a longitudinal ASD co-design study and (2) adolescents with ASD are also able to make better design decision over an iterative software design process. These findings should be considered when engaging adolescents with ASD as co-designers in a software design process.

Last impressions might count more

Graph showing a peak one third of the way through the time scale and another at the end of the visitor experience.First impressions might not be as critical as we first thought or were taught. This is especially the case with website start or landing pages. The Axess Lab has a good article on a flipped approach to web design. It seems the critical points for website visitors is their “peak experience” – best or worst- and the last experience. The last experience is the most important. This is based on Nobel Prize winning masterpiece, Thinking Fast and Slow. The article goes on to explain how to get the best impact for the last experience using the peak-end rule.

For an example of a good end experience, the article links to a UK Government thank you page. It was so well done that they encouraged more people to sign up as organ donors. There’s also some advice on footers. 

As always, Axess Lab uses good techniques and design for its own web pages and this article. That makes it an interesting read for anyone, not just IT people. More good material in other articles as well.

Graphic courtesy of Axess Lab

 

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