This is my presentation from RailConf 2006 on considerations for designing with accessibility.

1. Rails+AJAX
and
Universal
Design

2. Today’s talk in 3 parts
Universal Design, Accessibility and Usability
User centered design for the Agile process
Ajax and Rails make Universal Design easy

3. What is universal design?
“A focus on designing products so that they are usable by the widest range
of people operating in the widest range of situations as is commercially
practical.” - Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden
Also called “inclusive design” by industrial or product designers
There is debate regarding the relationship of usability to accessibility

4. Accessibility is for...
People with disabilities
blindness, low vision, color-blindness, deafness
Sensory (we don’t do smell or taste, yet.)
Motor speech or physical impairments
Cognitive speech aphasia, dyslexia
People with technical or cultural disadvantages
• Old computers and/or slow Internet connections
• English as a second language, non-native speakers, cultural mis-translations, etc.

5. Accessible technology
Perceivable Content must be perceivable to each user
User interface components in the content
Operable must be operable by each user
Content and controls must be understandable
Understandable to each user
Content must be robust enough to work with
Robust current and future technologies
POUR

6. Usable technology
“Usability: the extent to which a product can be used by
specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness,
efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.”
- ISO-9241
Jakob Nielsen in Usability Engineering cites 5 factors:
• Learnability
• Efficiency
• Memorability
• Errors
• Satisfaction
SMEEL? SLEME? MEELS?

7. Epicenter or IUI design
37signals.com
“Start from the core of the page and build
outward”
Microsoft: Inductive User Interface design
“...a new user interface model that suggests how
to make software applications simpler by
breaking features into screens or pages that are
easy to explain and understand.”

8. Steve Krug’s Trunk Test
What site is this?
What page am I on?
What are the major sections of this site?
What are my options at this level?
Where am I in the scheme of thing?
How can I search?

9. Heuristic Evaluation
Discount usability evaluation method by Nielsen
and Molich (1990)
• Visibility of System Status
• Match Between System and the Real World
• User Control and Freedom
• Consistency and Standards
• Error Prevention
• Recognition Rather than Recall
• Flexibility and Efficiency of Use
• Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
• Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors
• Help and Documentation

10. Tog’s First Principles
Tog has a good introduction to interaction design
concerns. Because it’s Tog, it’s fairly idiosyncratic.
“The time to acquire a target is a function of the
distance to and size of the target.” - Fitts’ Law
Fitts’ Law Applied
• For desktop design, this means corners and edges of the screen are ideal
• For web design, it means big buttons are beautiful
• For both environments, the center of the screen is a great hotspot

11. Why is it important?
Reach more people
• By 2020, estimates are 40 million Americans will have a visual disability
• 1.5 million+ blind and visually impaired Americans access the Internet
• Search engine benefits
• Graceful degradation for lazy support of handheld, PDAs or text-based
browsers
Legal protection
Increased public approval
It’s the right thing to do

12. How do we
accommodate users?
People with disabilities
Web standards XHTML+CSS
Sensory Multimedia (podcasts, mpgs) must be transcribed
Motor Assistive hardware
Cognitive impairments such as speech aphasia, are
Cognitive often not addressable
People with technical or cultural disadvantages
• Page optimization, alt text (in case they turn off images), etc.
• Language declaration, standardized access keys, etc.

13. Visual disability != blind
•Age-related macular
degeneration (AMD),
glaucoma, cataract, and
diabetic retinopathy are
the most common eye
diseases in Americans age
40+
•8% of males and 0.4 - 2% of
females are color blind

14. Screen magnifiers
•Application magnifies some or
all of screen for users with
partial vision; apps may also
invert the colors for greater
contrast
•Included in operating systems
(WinXP, Mac OS X) or
available as a standalone
application (ZoomTest)

15. Screen readers
Make 2D visual content 1D
(serialization) then it reads it.
• Job Access With Speech (JAWS)
• Integrated with OS
• These apps offer modes for
applications: web mode, form
browsing mode
• IBM Home Page Reader
(browser)

16. Blind users
Blind users more capable than sighted of grokking serialized
content. In one study, novice blind screen reader users were
able to comprehend speech at 370 words per minute;
accomplished users could listen at 490 wpm or more.
Is Thomas here?
Here’s 100 wpm

17. Assistive hardware
Datahand Personal Edition Sip and puff system
For motor disabilities
predictive keyboards, on screen
keyboards, eye-tracking systems,
mouse by mouth
Headwand

18. Legal + W3C framework
Americans with
Disabilities Act, WCAG 1.0 WCAG 2.0
1990 34 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
Priority Final comments
Priority 2 1 Priority 3 due 05/31/2006
You must Recommended you
You should solve
solve solve
14 ?
Section 255 guidelines ?
Telecom.
Section 608b
Act of 1996 Riot Act of '12
216 e-Europe
2002 2010
Section 508a guidelines?!?
European Union
Rehabilitation Act AUS:1992 Accessibility
Amendments o'98 JAP, UK:1999
CAN:2000
Standards
66 guidelines! ITA, NZ:2001

19. Ewwwww... lawyers
These cases are often to shame the site or service into accessibility
• Ramada.com and Priceline.com investigated in NY state under ADA
• Access Now, Inc. v. Southwest Airlines, Co.
• America Online sued
• Target.com sued February, 2006 for excluding “the blind from full and
equal participation in the growing Internet economy”

20. Why do I care?
You may be a developer, designer, or sweeper. Regardless, the
user is your responsibility.
Yes, you, the one who argues the pros and cons of distributed
DB transactions and multiple inheritance with your friends.
You have a form factor that is mutable in appearance,
behavior, content and context.
Good software lets customers have their cake and eat it, too.
Don’t bar users with special needs or make them sit at the
“separate but equal” lunch counter.
Black turtleneck optional.

21. How do I know what I’m
doing to whom?

22. Introduction to personas
Alan Cooper has a saying:
When boarding a plane, software engineers turn
left, mere mortals turn right.
Most of us don’t want to know how the plane
flies, we just want to get where we’re going.

23. Why personas?
You are not a user.
Your customer may be a user, but not a typical
one. Users don’t often get to design the UI.
Cooper’s 4 truisms:
• There is no “Elastic User”
• Being the victim of a problem doesn’t mean you know the solution
• Designing with equal weight for all users leads to a weak interface
• Real users (an audience of one) are often quirky. Personas smooth out the
rough edges
from About Face 2.0

24. Agile Personas
Cooper and Reimann make the point that coders cannot
simultaneously be designers. They claim it is a mental stretch
that isn’t easily made.
Cooper invests weeks or months in doing discovery and
primary research to drive product development strategically.
It’s okay, we’re not doing it solo.
We are going to go Agile, and work with the customer to
define our personas.

25. Agile Personas
Core Principles of Agile Modeling
• Assume Simplicity
• Embrace Change
• Enabling the Next Effort is Your Secondary Goal
• Incremental Change
• Maximize Stakeholder Investment
• Model With a Purpose
• Multiple Models
• Quality Work
• Rapid Feedback
• Software Is Your Primary Goal
• Travel Light

26. Personas in action
Make many personas, and as you work with the customer,
you will discover the primary persona. (Multiple models,
Maximize stakeholder investment)
Dial in to the level of fidelity you need now. You can always
add metadata like education, emotional profiles, etc., later.
(Embrace change, incremental change)
Often times the work can provide insight, but you need to
turn it into results.
Update personas over time, keep them current as you learn
about your users and their demands change.

27. Persona attributes
Name, sex, age range, technical/domain experience, job.
User goals. The most important part.
Primary, secondary or negative personas. The most... well,
another important part.
One to two paragraph narrative of persona’s personal
experience.
Can have multiple personas in any role.
Get a picture from Corbis, Getty, flickr, or google.
A quote from the persona.

28. Where do you find data?
From your customer
• They may have marketing segmentation studies, surveys, or contact info for
users
• Don’t let them be evil about it.
Do a task analysis or contextual inquiry
Grab some research from Jupiter Research, etc.
Google for personas you can extend
Use diveintoaccessibility.org’s personas for people with
disabilities
Examine your logs
Engage groups--user groups, support groups, pay a
recruitment firm

29. Task analysis
Helps to understand how people do analogous
tasks in the world today.
• It may be a software-based solution to improve (more on this later)
• You could be creating something entirely new, and be looking for convenient
metaphors
Common questions:
• How often (frequency) do you...
• How long (duration) do you...
• Importance (critical function, like stopping a reactor) to you...
• What tools do they use to do it today?
• Do they use forms to do it (paper, online, etc.)?
• Probe for internet usage, technical experience
• Try to get a sense of their day to day world

30. Um, this is RailsConf!
Intelligent URL design, with three or fewer attributes, helps users and
search engines. Use labels and terms that resonate with the personas.
Scaffold forms are accessible out of the box, there’s comprehensive
layouts and shared partials to provide accessibility features such as
jump navigation, accesskeys, and relative links. Consistent filenaming
conventions aids both search engines and the disabled, especially if
you use whole words, and not abbreviations.

31. Um, this is RailsConf!
Rail’s newness lends to a progressive enhancement technique
as you build new sites and products
Rail 1.1’s adoption of new methods (e.g., Streamlined) offer
the possibility of componetizing those aspects of accessibility
once strategies are developed.
Check out http://diveintoaccessibility.org/ Mark Pilgrim lays
out the code-related issues far better than I could hope to
here.
I also highly recommend Jim Thatcher’s site and the book he
edited http://www.jimthatcher.com/ and Constructing Accessible
Websites.

32. Graceful degradation,
Progressive enhancement
Graceful degradation
• A lithe solution to presentation. What happens to agents who don’t understand all this
semantic markup, images, css?
• A stumbly solution to interaction. It’s not as easy as cross-browser DOM scripting,
which means it’s really murky, indeed. What happens without javascript? What happens
with funky implementations of Javascript?
Progressive enhancement
• As you add more interactivity, from Web 1.0 to Rich Internet Application type features,
ensure the prior, less interactive version is not broken.
• There are still no clear solutions for AJAX and screen readers.
• http://hesketh.com/publications/progressive_enhancement_paving_way_for_future.html
Text Alternative
• If all else fails, you can punt them to a text site... if you can keep it updated.
• Separate but equal? Violates the DRY principle, unless you write code to generate it.

33. Rails Scaffold Web 1.0?
Dave Thomas mentioned in the keynote these need to be
moved forward to web 2.0 (no SM). He is absolutely right.
They also need to keep their roots via progressive
enhancement since we can’t always filter for accessibilized
user agents or gracefully degrade with AJAX
Scaffold form tags are well-formed. Create good labels, then
leave them alone:

34. Ajax and Screenreaders
Support is uneven across agents. Disabled users
could be using the same browser you are right
now.
On Script.aculo.us with JAWS:
• Autocomplete works fine
• Using the drag’n’drop cart you don’t hear a whisper.
James Edwards has some recent findings here:
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/ajax-screenreaders-work

35. No accessibility,
no usability
(no product)

36. Accessibility without usability
Big button phones are meant to
serve people with visual or slight
motor impairments, with large,
high contrast buttons. A handset
form factor limits the appeal and
is not universal design.
In order to serve the needs of
specific users, the designers
emphasized features that make
this phone less attractive to
many users.
The more modern BT100 puts
the numbers on the base and
includes a handsfree mode.

37. Usability without accessibility
This car seat is a human factors wonder, designed to accommodate people
of many shapes and sizes, from Gilbert Brown to Kerri Strug.
It is not meant to be accessible.

38. Accessibility as usability
The famous OXO Good Grips
tools came from a kitchenware
manufacturer, Sam Farber. Upon
retirement he observed the
impact of non-accessible tools
upon his wife’s arthritic hands.
These category-leading utensils
are pleasurable for everybody to
use.
Incorporating human factors and
engineering to determine the
form, such as oval handles that
spread force evenly across the
hand.

39. Big future endnote
Ruby on Rails is fast becoming the API for web
applications, UI to DB, like the Windows API
once was for desktop applications.
Let’s build this platform for everyone, and learn
from the mistakes of the past, when accessibility
was an afterthought.

40. Thanks, Errata, and Apologies
I said I’d have more examples, and I simply ran out of time.
Please do download a screenreader or use VoiceOver. Feel
the frustration.
My apologies to other speakers--I struggled with a sick
daughter all week, and finalized this presentation on-site.
Sorry for being the rude guy typing in the back of the room,
believe me, it hurt me more than it hurt you.
All the links and references mentioned here can be found at:
http://del.icio.us/jdkunesh/ tagged accessibilty and/or usabiility
jason@kuniform.org

41. Shameless pluggery
I worked out many of the methods for doing this
while working on revizit.com in graduate school.
If you’re interested, you can sign up to be a part
of our beta test group, and tell us how bad the
app sucks. You guys are a negative persona. ;-)
http://revizit.com/