All transcriptions are created with voice recognition. They are not 100 percent accurate. You will find minor errors.
Hello everyone. Welcome to the January 18, 2006 addition of Barrier-free IT – Tips and Tricks. I’m Dick Banks and we hope you enjoy today’s episode. I want to talk a bit about what you are about to hear. It might help you to understand what is going on.
For the past two years EASI has been doing online, synchronous presentations on a wide variety of topics related to Barrier-free IT. These presentations or clinics, as we have come to call them are done by professionals in the area on IT and universal design. In these clinics we have the ability to have participants follow along as the presenter pushes webpages. We are still offering these online presentations. Many are free and open to anyone. Some are fee based. These fee-based presentations are generally in two or three parts and are very much like short courses on various topics. Any of you listening to this podcast are certainly welcome to attend any of our free clinics and we hope you will consider some of the fee-based ones. Rather than taking up your time talking about the clinics, point your browser to, http://www.easi.cc/. Then click on Web Conferences. You will find the information there along with registration forms for signing up.
During this and other podcasts, you may here presenters mention pushing the next slide or talking about points on a slide. Obviously you will not have those slides. You will miss nothing. All the important information on the given topic will be covered in the audio presentation. So, you don;'t have to take your eyes off the road. So, now to today's podcast.
This week and next week Alan Cantor from Toronto, Canada will be talking about Wormholes Through WIndows. You heard that right. Hold on, you will see why.
Alan Cantor is an internationally-known consultant, researcher, writer, and educator on disability and technology. Services offered by his company, Cantor Access Inc. include: accessibility and usability testing; job accommodation planning; assistive technology training; web remediation; ergonomic consulting; and corporate workshops on technology and disability. For more information check, http://www.cantoraccess.com/.
OK, now that we have set the stage, so to speak. Lets get into today's episode.
I remember when Windows first came out when it was first becoming increasingly popular in the early 1990s those of us that were involved in the specific technologies were a bit apprehensive and then Windows 95 came out unknown there were a lot of initial problems with screen reader support and all the rest. And I know many of us were predicting the worst, but actually Windows has turned out not to be as bad as we feared in terms of accessibility. And I know many people who were four example screen reader users will have come to admit that they actually find the situation better now than it ever was under DOS. at the same time almost everyone I speak to has that opinion about certain applications that they used to use. Along with better access we also got a lot of complication, since we can't go backwards in time we can at least make modifications to a fairly malleable operating system and a fairly malleable program so they can at least work a little bit more directly. for this first session I want to talk about Windows based application and underlined usability. usability is going to be my theme running throughout this four-part series. by usability a game the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction which users can achieve tasks in a particular environment of a product. high usability means that it is easy to use and easy to remember. it is visually pleasing. it's fun to use and its quick and graceful recovering from errors. a lot to take this dictionary definition and break it up a little bit.
I like to talk that usability has four main dimensions or factors of usability and let me just make clear what the connection between usability and accessibility is. for example their student at a university in her turn to use an application and you can't read the instructions on the screen it is not accessible and it is also not usable to you. in the larger university as we have usability in the subset of that is accessibility. so what if my favorite occupation these days are working with engineers, who have never really thought about their product. when trying to make a product that works well for all people, all people includes various different kinds of disabilities. the four dimensions of usability that I will be talking about here, are cognitive, physical, those relating to productivity, and emotional issues. for some of the cognitive issues.
There are issues around perceptive ability, what the things can be recognized, discoverable, and learnable. this is a hierarchy of sorts that most software it is about perceptive ability. if you cannot perceive what is on a screen, what information has been given to you, that it is not usable, or accessible. in recognizable refers mostly to there are things you recognized from one context and you can use in in other context. it is a lot about consistency. if you're using a particular program and the program has its menus as file, edit, format that you go to use another program and its file format edit. now you have two change the way you perceive a program, it is all about consistency that breaks usability. we're trying to bring back recognizability and consistency. in an ideal world software we would be able to figure it out, you wouldn't have to read manuals or take courses. you could discover what you need to do just by playing with it. so discover ability is an issue in usability because if you can't discover something you will have to go to other sources you might have to go to your social circles, to technical support. learned ability is what we fall back on, how easy is it to learn something this can also relate to the accessibility of the learning sources or help pages. is it possible to navigate them to get to what you want. talking about the cognitive parts of usability yesterday of a to perceive, recognize information you have to be able to discover how things work. also it has to be pretty straightforward to learne them. here are some examples of cognitive factors these are actual problems with Windows and Windows applications, there tends to be some issues with perception with sighted users anyway, with thefocus indicators that show you where you are working on the screen.
they tend to be very inconspicuous. they're also focus indicators that are completely invisible where they cannot be seen as a specially affects keyboard users but this also can affect screen reader users and you tab around the screen and you arrive somewhere and it cannot tell you where you are because something is broken. perception is also influenced by a busy screen, if there's a control panel with 50 buttons on it it is too busy and you cannot figure out where you are. another common issue that we see is fonts that are put into a program that cannot be scaled, this really is difficult for people using enlargement software, this is hard on people who are in public places and cannot rescale. this is another thing, the alt key works in so many ways, sometimes you have two hold it, sometimes you just need to press it and release it, sometimes you have to tap it. another recognizability issue related to consistency, we have at least four kinds of different menus. we have menus of applications. we have the start menu that works in a completely different way. Then we have the right click menus which work in a completely different way, and now there are fly out menus on web pages which have to be worked in another way. so every time a new kind of manual was introduced it means users need to learn something else. when I was try to teach my parents or in their late 70s how to use a computer they're having trouble learning when to click double click or right-click. their different menus, different rules different aspects and different rules for those as well.
There's a lot that is no longer discoverable in Windows, and the situation gets worse. as something improves other things work not so well. help systems and find used to be fairly straightforward, screen reader users have to memorize hot keys. it was also and possible to get to areas just by pressing tab. jaws now has two announce hot keys.
OK, That is it for today. We hope you will join us next week for the second episode. Alan will dig a bit deeper into Wormholes Through Windows. I love that title. Stroke of genious, Alan.
OH, while I think of it. I am doing a free clinic on January 19th and you all are invited. The free clinic will cover webpage evaluation tools for checking pages and their accessibility and useability. Just pint your browser to: http://www.easi.cc/, then click on the Web Conferences link and you will find a registration link.
Thanks for letting use be a part of your pod life. See ya next week.