Accessibility workshop.

Lord this would have been handy for the Alzheimer’s project!

I love the way Katia frames things, like she isn’t an expert in X and is really open to other ways of seeing what X can be. With the accessibility workshop, for example, it was grand hearing what Marion had to say about it in the public sector, and how diversity is central to allowing or accepting accessibility.

The core problem is the judgements the UX or UI designer brings. For example, what accessibility issues do you preference or exclude and why? Should visual impairment take precedence over colour blindness? And if you are focusing on colour blindness, which form do you work towards?

One of the things I learned from the Alz project is that there are so many things that can get lost along the wayside if those central core philosophies aren’t maintained at the front of mind, and that time and pressure can remove some of the core things you want to implement.

Bianca and I have, I hope, been working well together for the HealthNav project. I ran the HealthNav home page and some main competitors through the accessibility tool wave.webaim.org, which gives a report based on accessibility standards. Further investigation showed that there is another tool (NAME) that can be used, and the 2 tools can result in different accessibility issues. Ok, cool. Pick one and go for it.

This resulted in really interesting information, and it also meant that neither Bianca or I had to be personally responsible for some of the results. It can be really hard to say to your industry partner “this doesn’t work because…” when they have put their heart and soul into their product, but if you have a standardising tool, and can show the comparatives, then it’s like you are absolved of the responsibility of hurting their feeling but can still objectively make suggestions.

Kaita suggested we look at sharing 3 main grabs with them (as the resulting list was frightfully long, especially compared to some of the other examples. Hopefully, by selecting easy fixes (such as missing alt text, which is a huge issue for screen readers) will give them the confidence that we do in fact know what we are talking about and are able to focus on the accessibility issues they want.

Merion suggested looking at Hemmingway, which checks web content for grade level. As a reporting tool, it is great, as it highlights different ways of saying things. The only downer of it as a tool is that medical information has its own distinct language, and that language can’t really be changed. However, the way it’s framed can be!