Real-Life Accessibility, or, How I Should Have Spent My Summer Vacation
Presenter: Steve Krug
The text alternative to a PowerPoint presentation delivered by Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, at the January 26, 2006 meeting of Boston-IA. The presentation was accompanied by conversations about accessibility issues with P.J. Gardner, founder of Boston-IA.
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Slide 1:
Real-Life Accessibility (or, How I Should have Spent My Summer Vacation)
Steve Krug
Boston-IA
January 26, 2006
[Book Cover: Don't Make Me Think, A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.]
Slide 2:
Who is this guy, anyway?
Steve Krug (steev kroog) (noun):
- Son, husband, father.
- Resident of Brookline, Massachusetts.
- Usability consultant, author.
[Cartoon of Steve Krug from Don't Make Me Think, A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.]
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Slide 3:
This evening
Slide 4:
Apologia
- Like to apologize in advance to anyone I might offend.
- Not a bad person, really (I think).
- Political Correctness makes me edgy, sometimes escalating to irascible.
- Again, my apologies.
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Slide 5:
Apologia, continued
- I don’t like engaging in debates.
- Inveterate lurker on listserv’s.
- Not a bum; contribute in off-list e-mail.
- Debates usually seem more heat than light.
- It all feels like Fox News to me.
- Life is too short.
- So please don’t e-mail me to debate.
- But I’m happy to discuss (even heatedly) face-to-face (e.g., here tonight).
- Ask questions as we go along.
Slide 6:
Hoist by my own petard
- Been asking myself: How did I end up here?
- [Quotation from Shakespeare] "For 'tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his owne petar."
—Hamlet, Act III, Scene iv.
- [Expression from an Early Radio Show] "This Is Your Bed, You Made It, Now Lie In It."
—Bob Goulding and Ray Elliot.
Slide 7:
How I got into this mess
- I really never intended to talk about accessibility.
- Not an accessibility expert.
- Don’t even play one on TV.
- Most of you may know much more about accessibility than I do.
- I don’t plan on becoming an expert.
- Sherlock Holmes got it right. [Story about how Holmes didn’t know the earth revolved around the sun. He said he couldn’t know everything and it made no difference to him.]
- That’s why we have books, Google, and...
- P.J. Gardner!
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Slide 8:
So why a chapter?
- Figured accessibility was the right thing.
- As in “doing the right thing.”
- But they weren’t selling me, somehow.
- And I should have been an easy sell.
- Most small sites are dancing as fast as they can even without thinking about accessibility.
- Interested whether there was a real conflict.
- Is accessibility the enemy of design?
- Do buttered cats really exist?
Slide 9:
[Example Web Page]
[justaddwater.dk, a website with the text that follows.]
One of four web users are disabled users
Did you know that up to 25% of all visitors on your website has [sic] some kind of accessibility problem. Some of your users may be blind, deaf, dyslectic, have learning disabilities or motoric disabilities such as schlerosis, parkinson’s disease, etc. A so-called functional disability.
But how about users with a technical disability: Wireless devices, slow internet connections, old browsers, feed readers, etc. These should be considered as well, as there are probably more people with....
[Steve's comment is: "Some advocates cite 50% and higher! (Loses credibility...)"].
Slide 10:
A walk through the chapter
- Added to the second edition of Don't Make Me Think.
- [Chapter Title] “Accessibility, Cascading Style Sheets, and you”.
- Download it (for your personal use):
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Slide 11:
A walk through the chapter (2)
- Fix the usability problems that confuse everyone.
- Read an article.
- “Guidelines for accessible and usable web sites: Observing users who work with screen readers”.
- Read a book.
- Start using Cascading Style Sheets.
- Go for the low-hanging fruit.
Slide 12:
A brief history of sensible.com
- A modest site, even now (see site map).
- 1996-2000: Happy as a clam with my one-pager.
- 2000: Book needed its own page.
- 2001: Workshops needed some pages.
- Homegrown in Dreamweaver.
- Always asking people not to look under the hood.
- Cobbler's kids.
- But I always had alt text!
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Slide 13:
[Old View of Steve's Web Site]
[A view of Advanced Common Sense at www.sensible.com from December 1998 showing alt text on the daily temperature saying, "Click for Boston, Massachusetts Forecast".]
Slide 14:
My report card
[On a scale of 1 to 10.]
- Make it usable
- [Grade:] 8.
- A 10 would require real work.
- “good enough” usability.
- Read an article.
- Read a book.
- [Grade:] 7.
- Read most of one, parts of four or five, but retained little.
- Figured to go back to several of them while doing my site.
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Slide 15:
My report card (2)
- Start using CSS.
- [Grade:] Average, 5.
- Hired Eric Meyer = 10.
- Didn’t follow through = 1.
- Go for the low-hanging fruit.
- [Grade:] 7.
- Did some myself.
- Hired P.J.
Slide 16:
Before and after
- Conversation with P.J. Gardner.
[Dialogue plus questions from the audience. The following seven slides review Steve's website before and after P.J. made some accessibility changes.]
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Slide 17:
[Steve's Links Before, 1 of 4]
Links on my home page, as read by JAWS (1 of 4, BEFORE).
[View of Steve Krug's Web site before P.J. Gardner made accessibility changes. The JAWS Links List (reading the links on the page from the top in Tab Order) says:]
- The workshop
- Who we are
- What we do
- The book
- about
- Steve Krug
- Steve Krug (cartoon image)
- usability workshops
- Lou Rosenfeld
Slide 18:
[Steve's Links Before, 2 of 4]
Links on my home page, as read by JAWS (2 of 4, BEFORE).
[The second view of the JAWS Links List says:]
- let me know
- Book cover: Don't Make Me Think
- Read a chapter
- Order the Second Edition
- buythebook
- Second Edition page
- Sample usability test script
- Video consent form
- User testing chapters from the first edition
[Arrows point to "let me know" and "buythebook" and say "Bad!".]
Slide 19:
[Steve's Links Before, 3 of 4]
Links on my home page, as read by JAWS (3 of 4, BEFORE).
[The third view of the JAWS Links List says:]
- here
- Boxes and Arrows
- O'Reilly Web DevCenter
- WebReference
- since1968
- pair Networks
- Management Consulting News
- WebTalkGuys
- MediaPlayer
[An arrow points to "here" and says "Bad!".]
Slide 20:
[Steve's Links Before, 4 of 4]
Links on my home page, as read by JAWS (4 of 4, BEFORE).
[The fourth view of the JAWS Links List says:]
- Real Audio
- Let's Talk Computers
- Luminary Lecture
- HOME
- WHO WE ARE
- WHAT WE DO
- THE BOOK
- THE WORKSHOP
- Click for Boston, Massachusetts weather forecast
Slide 21:
[Steve's Links After]
Links on my home page, as edited by P.J. (AFTER).
[The equivalent of the second view of the JAWS Links List now says:]
- let me know where you are
- Book cover: Don't Make Me Think
- Read a chapter
- Order the Second Edition
- Second Edition page
- Sample test script
- Video consent form
- User testing chapters from the first edition
- add you to my mailing list
[Arrows point to "let me know where you are" and "add you to my mailing list" and say "Better?".]
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Slide 22:
[Steve's Headings Before]
Headings on my home page, as read by JAWS (BEFORE).
[JAWS says, "No headings found...."]
Slide 23:
[Steve's Headings After]
Headings on my home page, as read by JAWS (AFTER).
[The JAWS Heading List (in Tab Order) says:]
- The Workshop!: 2
- This Month's Tip...: 2
- The Book!: 2
- The Second Edition!: 2
- Looking for Downloads?: 2
- Get email from me! (Wow!): 2
- Interviews: 2
[The "2" after each heading indicates that all headings on the page are Heading Level 2 (because Steve believes Home pages should not have page titles, like other pages).]
Slide 24:
Thoughts
- Should you wait for your next redesign to make the site accessible?
- Avoid duplicating effort.
- Why clean up things that may be going away?
- My experience: might be better to decouple them.
- Hmm. Before I convert to CSS, I should probably rethink the IA [Information Architecture] like I’ve been meaning to for years now. And I really should edit that text. And it really make sense to insulate the attic first, too...
- The sense that it’s overwhelming becomes one more reason not to “just do it”.
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Slide 25:
Thoughts (2)
- It’s not about guidelines.
- Guidelines are a means to an end.
- The end: people being able to use it.
- Not satisfying guidelines.
- Sounds a lot like usability?
- The problem: in this case, we’re terrible surrogates for our audience.
- They’re diverse.
- We don’t know them.
- We have a hard time pretending to be them.
- In part, because we don’t want to imagine being like them.
Slide 26:
Thoughts (3)
- Why don’t we all just do it?
- Not sure how hard it is.
- Not sure how much we need to learn.
- Once you start reading, experts disagree.
- Unlike the visible UI [user interface], out of sight, out of mind.
- Imitation/copying is one of the main reasons the Web has improved so much so soon.
- Hard to actually tell which sites are accessible.
Slide 27:
Thanks a lot ([Curses] @%^!$!)
- Now I can’t look at comps [comprehensives] from clients anymore without thinking, “What about accessibility?”
Slide 28:
Thanks for all the fish
- Lingering questions, gripes, etc.
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© 2006 Steve Krug. All rights reserved.
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