Accessibility & Usability: Equality of Experience

welcome to accessibility and usability the Equality of experience I want you to go ahead if you want to follow along later go ahead and take off your phones get all ready because we're gonna have a URL and we're gonna have a QR code for you in just a minute there we go my name is Amber Wilks and I'm dr. Rebecca green and we're actually team members on the user experience team so my background is actually in design and I've been with Cerner about four years now almost four years and I've been making solutions accessible since about 2008 and I'm a researcher in fact my PhD is in human factors and I've been working on accessible products since about 2006 alright so you got your phone's ready you can QR code it up or you can go into the URL I used fitly yes everybody's familiar servo HTTP colon slash slash bitly zero seven one four one six if it's today's date yeah so you guys want to follow along with a transcript to our talk today so you guys got it we're good bit dot Lee slash zero seven one four one six okay so we are here today to talk about accessibility and usability kind of shed some light on it we want to start off with by first saying that just because something is accessible doesn't mean it's usable and just because it's usable doesn't mean it's accessible and so why is this important well because a lot of people when they talk about accessibility and usability and they think that they're the same thing when they're actually not but before we actually talk about what accessibility is let's talk about what it isn't and to do that we're going to cover some pretty common myths about accessibility that we've heard teams and other people say in the past so the first myth that we kind of hear all the time is accessibility it's just all about screen readers and alt takes when in fact there are more ways of possessing the content than just through a screen reader see the variety of assistive technologies is just numerous the US Census in fact indicates that visual disabilities are just a small slice of population with disabilities so even though it gets a lot of attention it's still a very small subset of the disabled population so miss number myth number two is that you don't need content to design when in fact users are coming for information I mean when was the last time you went to a restaurants website to access the pretty pictures I go for the hours I always go for the menu or the location I can't find my way around Kansas City stuff so as a designer when we are challenged with creating a layout with no content we obviously use a bunch of lorem ipsum some fake Greek coffee we put in really pretty images I mean get it all formatted and it looks beautiful and so we don't bend the actual real content which breaks because without the content originally it's a completely unrealistic design and it also creates this expectation that content is kind of secondary to the design when in fact it's the most integral part and usability tests actually prove that if you have high quality content you're gonna have higher usability scores so another one that we hear is that accessibility is this minefield that's really scary to navigate when in fact it's simply a blend of legislation and regulation the aims to eliminate the barriers of technology for people with disabilities so what do we mean when we say a disability well it's kind of big and broad so I want to cover all of the different pieces that exist within disability so it's going to be the vision and hearing disability seizure disorders cognitive disorders and limited mobility and in 2014 there were 37 point 9 million people in the United States alone with one of these disabilities it makes up about twelve point six percent of our population or about one in every ten people so if you look down your road that means that there's likely that one person in each row has some form of it wasn't that long ago in our recent history that there was no laws for accessibility in the u.s. in fact disabilities particularly cognitive disabilities were not well understood and they were frequently categorized and sick and placed in mental institutions or convalescent hospitals so I let's start off with a story that made a big impact some of you might not know about rosemary Kennedy she was the oldest sister of John F Kennedy yes that 35th President she was described as absolutely beautiful with a gorgeous smile however there were complications in her birth that made her probably a little less academic and athletic than her siblings Nash she grew older she demonstrated behavioral problems that her family looked everywhere to help her with so some doctors suggested a technique that had only been performed about 80 times which was a prefrontal lobotomy as you might guess it failed and left her permanently incapacitated and she spent the rest of her life in a mental institution with little contact from her family it's absolutely heartbreaking it is probably for this reason that her sister Eunice began the Special Olympics in 1962 it's kind of a nice kind of wrap up the kind of background of why we have the Special Olympics it's really kind of touching I think you know it wasn't that long ago in 1963 that American standards Association or ANSI created the first documents its standards for handicapped physically handicapped people and buildings so no but the ANSI standards Association those are those like a regulatory body within the government they're a standards organization kind of like ISO okay and it took ten long years for 49 states to adopt these standards before the federal government jumped in and created the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 which provided opportunities to prohibit discriminating against individuals with disabilities it's only been within our lifetime that the government has funded an issue for assistive technology and recently additional government regulations such as the American Disabilities Act or ADA a which some of you might know as being the way that they prohibit from discriminating unemployment for like race color religion it's only been recently that they provided an amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 called section 508 section 508 prohibits discrimination in terms of assistive technology in information technology in fact section 508 is one of two different types of guidelines the other one is the web content accessibility group WCAG and so I'm gonna give you a couple of differences between these two starting off section 508 spans across multiple different information technology groups whereas WCAG primarily covers just the web section 508 doesn't have levels of ratings associated with it whereas WCAG actually does it has your single a your double a and your triple a section 508 is US legislation which means that it's us-based and WCAG is independent guidelines for Universal Design which actually impacts global so section 508 and WCAG are just two little bitty pieces to a larger landscape of all the legislation and regulation that exists then makeup accessibility so now that we've talked about what accessibility isn't let's talk about what accessibility is it's the degree to which a device service or environment mate is made available to everyone excessive usability on the other hand is the ease of use and learner ability of a product or software usability and accessibility together with the addition of research empathy and design creates a product that is usable by everyone and for the first time in human history computers and Technology really make it possible for us to make everything accessible to everyone and so we'll take the WCG as kind of an example as their regulations have kind of evolved so has there organization of all of the content and they've organized it into these kind of four principles and it turns out that the majority of the legislation and regulation that exists out there can all be lumped up into the same kind of tenant principles so principle number one is that your content must be perceivable principle number two is that interface elements in the content must be operable is that content and controls must be understandable and number four that content must be robust enough to work with future and current technologies so together we have perceivable operable understandable and robust or it's kind of lame but you're not gonna forget it so let's start on with our first principle information and UI components must be presented in ways users can perceive without using losing information or structure so what does that mean basically that we need to meet the users where they are so we do that by making sure that our content is distinguishable and making sure that we provide alternative forms of content so you're probably thinking how do we make our content distinguishable well we do that by color and contrast and tech soon so most of you probably work with clinical solutions and whenever we think about our clinical users we don't necessarily have to compensate with our solutions for any kind of a physical handicap because a doctor a surgeon is going to be able to see right and a nurse is gonna be able to lift you know 50 pounds so when we think about disability it's almost like we kind of shut off and we don't think that it applies for our clinical solutions but just because our clinicians don't have physical disabilities it doesn't mean that they can't be folded into other disabilities I mean I'm not immuned and in fact the British Journal of general practice did a survey a physician's male positions and found that the rate of color deficiency in the male physician population was very similar to that of the general population so about 8% so what does it mean for color deficiency if we are leveraging colors to communicate patient status and only colors it actually becomes very dangerous because the user can't necessarily distinguish the difference between the two you know this is important that some folks don't even realize that they're color deficient until much later in life in fact I didn't even know that my father was had a color deficiency until as much older in fact he has one of the most common deuteron Opia which is the green deficiency right right so that's why red and green as are when you start thinking about color blind you immediately think of red and green it's definitely the most common but it's really important to understand that it's not just about like two colors anybody with the color deficiency the entire spectrum of colors get lumped down into basically two buckets so you don't really have that full spectrum or scope of colors to leverage it's that's why on the user experience side we always start with either an icon or a textual reference to communicate a concept and color is just kind of the added whipped cream on top so always start with the content and then you can use color as the extract so not only do we need to pay attention to distinguishable content in terms of color and contrast but also texting 8.1 million people in the US have some form of vision disability and that's why in March 2013 web a did a survey of individuals with low vision and they found that screen readers were not the most common assistive technology in fact the bulk of it as you can see from this was around text size so what is texting texting is a method that they use to scale text size up and down within the view so successful tech zooming is when the content uniformly scales up and down with maintaining the content that was originally displayed unsuccessful consuming is when at 200% the content text images are obscured clipped or truncated so as the user zooming in and out of content make sure that it actually all stays there yes it needs to stay the same so the other piece is alternative content and it is just that it's providing alternative forms of content that actually support all of the senses so that means that when you have visual content you also need to provide audio content when you have audio content you need to provide a textual supplement that's why we've included this text version of our transcript for you today so as I mentioned earlier visual disabilities are just a small slice of the population well hearing disabilities aren't that much more that's why it's so interesting that hearing physical disabilities are employed 10% more than those with visual disabilities I've always actually found this stat really interesting whenever I first got into accessibility and I was like well why it seems really unfair why are people with vision disabilities less likely to be employed than those with hearing disabilities probably because there's much more support in the deaf community one of the ways that they support alternative content is through captioning which is the transcript of speech and sound effects not to be confused with subtitling which is a translation of dialogue these two working together though for the deaf community is really important and very powerful because it provides nuances that they might not otherwise get so it's really important that you meet the users where they are our second principle tells us that UI components in the content must be operable which I know it sounds like okay so it just must work but it actually means that the UI cannot require an interaction that a user can't perform how many of you remember Adobe Flash I know apples trying to kill it Adobe flashes was still kind of it was the hotness back in the early 2000s do you remember it was all the rage homestar runner anybody home star runner calm well the problem with flash is that it requires a mouse interaction and most assistive technologies out there actually function like a keyboard so flash sights are inherently and accessible that's why it's also important for our content to provide navigational markers so they can be mental points and understanding the complexity of the content that's why I'm going to share with you a really popular website Universal Studios I'm gonna share with you their navigation and from of reading read by one of the second most popular screen readers and be a navigation of visited planet we can also see this in when we navigate just through the links of this website it's almost as bad oh my gosh okay I can't I can't listen to that anymore well you know you saw that there was like duplicated links like now open that means that the user probably has to go digging for the information yeah it means everything is duplicated like how are they supposed to know which one is an actual link to the page or why the duplications are even there that's why it's so important to be very descriptive with your link names and as you might guess the list of accessibility problems with this website is like a mile long so probably a good key rule of thumb is if you can't navigate with the keyboard through a website it's probably not accessible right probably not that's why it's so important to give the user control so we're giving the user control like period we just they get the control of everything right well it's not just about inputs though or navigating through links it's about motion as well emotion timers animation and video so say you have a dialog window with a countdown timer like say you're in your bill pay and your authentication and you're on your bank site starts to kind of countdown it's not just users with limited mobility that would have difficulty reaching over and getting to the ok button or the refresh button in time we also have to account for users with dyslexia ADHD short-term memory and cognitive delays that would prevent them from possibly reading and comprehending the content as fast as they needed to be able to it's also important to think that even the most innocent patterns can actually have a really bad effect on some users so accessibility is really personal to me and that's because I have epilepsy and I used to work at a company that their front office had wallpaper that was black and white stripes these vertical like crazy wallpaper pieces and I stared too long at the wallpaper one day and the optical illusion of the high contrast of the stripes actually cost me to have a seizure and we had talked about how accessibility first started with building codes right with an Z yeah obviously I don't know if an Z covers vertical striped wallpaper might be an easy to maybe ban it from a design community instead not to mention the interior design yeah but it's one of those things where it wasn't moving but the optical illusion caused it to move and so therefore I had a really negative effect on me that nobody else would have ever probably anticipated so when we give users control it means we have to give them enough time to interact with the content so that you might be asking well what is enough time well each user is going to vary so instead of us having a guessing game to say is it 10 seconds 15 seconds it's all about giving controls to the user so that they can control it so we want to get them be able to pause and stop and hide content that's maybe moving or flashing or blinking around stupid wallpaper can't have a pause button our third principle tells us that making content or we need to make our content readable and understandable so we've talked a lot about like development frameworks and UI elements that exist but the content is actually the heart of accessibility and because people consume content in a variety of ways and we need to be flexible to kind of accommodate where their needs are not to mention that complex content is difficult to read for people and for robots yes can you imagine you probably think that well our clinicians you know they deal with complex data every day but they have no idea what a database is so if you pop open a little message and it says that there's been a big giant database err with a bunch of technical jargon in it all they see is a blah blah blah that's probably like where our members wouldn't necessarily understand what encounter is so that probably means that we need to make all of our content meaningful for all of our users they need to be able to have it presented in their own kind of language so another thing that we have to be aware of is that we ensure that our content appears and operates in a predictable way so that means there can't be flashing scrolling up multiple windows being opening otherwise our users could be very confused whether they have disabilities or not it's also important that we avoid and prevent mistakes error prevention error prevention is a key component of understandable content we're all human and we make mistakes even I do the most common forms of preventing errors is a dialog box so a dialog box is an immediate indication of an error in the con era but in a really intense environment like healthcare then an additional dialogue might not be everything that they need they also need to have error prevention so when I talk about error recovery I'm also talking about something like form validation so for invalidation become and leacy for an accessible individual something like this where you have a banner with the main error problem and multiple different errors that way the user can find the error in the context of the content as well as multiple errors on the screen I don't know about you guys but there's nothing more irritating when a website says hey there's an error and then you have to go hunting for it it makes it really difficult to like speed through stuff so our last principle is about being robust and that means that we need to make our content future friendly so there's a wide variety of assistive technologies from Braille readers to screen magnification to voice speech recognition such as dragon speaking or Siri serious being a good example so wasn't that long ago when WCAG first published their standards and WCG in 1999 was actually before there were mobile devices or websites I mean the technology landscape back in 1999 it was I hope most of you were alive by that time so I mean Google had just launched like the late of 1998 everybody was freaking out over y2k where were they freaking out and this wasn't even like a thought nobody was even thinking about that because we were all carrying around these guys you guys remember these I mean the faceplates were like the bomb diggity mmm that was high tech back then but now look at the landscape of Technology it's almost natural for us to think about our content as we're crafting our solutions how it moves and inside the ever-changing form-factor of all of these devices so begin future firmly doesn't mean that we have to keep up with technology though so we don't have to keep up with the Joneses as what you're saying no okay that's good it's just a matter of remembering a couple of basics and what I mean basics I mean things like writing valid code that sounds pretty logical optimizing your navigation using standard controls and content and staying away from known accessibility hazards so pretty basic stuff keeping it simple have you ever heard of Robson Square that's in Canada right Vancouver Canada check it out you guys see a little zigzag pattern going on in there any guesses it's actually the wheelchair round and it looks like it looks pretty awesome it's kind of a great example to show that when you think about accessibility from the beginning and you plan it into the design it actually becomes something really quite beautiful so we've covered perceivable operable understandable and robust kind of for tenant principles that help us understand legislation and all of the regulatory standards that exist out there like that's kind of their goal but the key to crafting these compelling awesome experiences across the variety of users that we have that equality of experience is through something known as universal design and universal design is the design and composition of buildings products and services so that they can be accessed understood and used by everybody it's kind of an accessible approach an inclusive approach to design so it's as simple as accessibility when folks usually think of it they think of it as just being part of a tiny piece of UI design when it or just a checkbox to complete at the end of development when in fact it's more than screen design it's about the users and their environment you know as you can tell we're pretty passionate about accessibility from friends with low vision to relatives with limited mobility it's almost like accessibility is designing for the you of the future it means paying attention to all the senses so kind of a key to remember is whenever you're developing content designing creating how would a user read or consume your content if they couldn't see it how would they if they couldn't hear it what extra things do you need to do for a user who's unable to touch in the interface if you have a touch device or if they're unable to use voice commands like what does that even look like so if you start thinking about and slicing it up that way it's gonna help you compensate for each of the individual needs accessibility really is a point of innovation it's I know just in my history of working with accessibility a lot of people assume that it's like weighing you down it's like this ball and chain that you have to carry around with you because it I mean it is difficult to understand sometimes it's not a minefield but it isn't a minefield in fact accessibility leads to greater usability because if it is accessible it's gonna have higher usability scores and you're gonna ensure that everyone's going to be able to use it so as you guys leave here today we would like you to consider that in a universe filled with possibilities it should be possible for everybody to experience them and one of the greatest experiences that we have ever had kind of working within accessibility is watching people with disabilities leverage technology I mean it is really eye-opening and so we wanted to kind of share an experience with you today so we're gonna leave you with this first photo a my feet I should be able to know who's in it all he said about him I need bail money as soon as possible yeah okay that doesn't surprise me Scott well so let's see what the voice-over says here this image may contain one or more people about door motorcycle Lake image I set up my account in 2009 before the accessibility team existed it took me several hours to do what probably would have taken somebody else like 15 or 20 minutes even back then what people were doing was posting pictures and talking about so you feel really excluded if you can't see the picture but this is a problem that as machines get smarter that machines can solve those 1986 when I first started using a screen reader I was an electrical engineering student of course I didn't want to just use them I started tinkering with him and getting their developers my opinion was right away and figuring out how to try to make them better and I did that same kind of thing as soon as I got IBM was actually an early leader in screen reading technology and IBM research I got to know the people in IBM research so this is what the very first baby steps were taking is what we're demonstrating here the ability to have our systems recognize objects in a photo and then put that together in some sort of meaningful description in this particular case like September 14 photo 2015 my friends are Shana updated her profile picture Lake image this image may contain Koli one person photo smiling and I had no idea what she posted it could have been anything not necessarily her but our system told me there's the photo may contain one person who's smiling it's really the idea that we're including everybody in the conversation and we're essentially telling people with disabilities that each one of you matters you know you're important your matter is a part of this community we want you to be part of the community we want you to be able to feel included thank you guys we do have some time left so we have some microphones that have been strategically placed if you want to come and ask some questions you are more than welcome yes Damian no you're not on yet hey there we go I was curious and you guys's experience what are some of like the most common mistakes you see from a design and development community alike that detract from the accessibility of a solution so on the design side back in again back in kind of the early 2000s designers were really quick to customize like a checkbox umbrella like the custom check boxes where it's more of like an image and they have to toggle the states of the images and basically what that does from a development side as it means to keep it accessible you have to hide the input field way over here and you have to have all of the visual representation over here and it's just a lot of extra work that because you didn't use a standard component it's a new technology actually comes in it's immediately going to break so it's from the design side it's basically over designing Becca do you have anything from the development side or anything most commonly we're kind of seeing this new trend for using area which is a are ia which helps support that content and structure the backend structure of our websites and so there's a lot of confusion and misunderstanding of how to use that so that's kind of where we see kind of a new frontier are there any like really simple things that you guys catch all the time that people can take away from this like I know Becca and amber you both talked about like alt tags and those types of things so need like simple things that people can very easily remember from this talk if you have a link and it says click here that's not going to be accessible so make sure that you describe where the users going for both decided and then on user click here to access something and then when you get back into the alt text of it you know you're clicking here or it's a link to access whatever it's going to be so being as descriptive as possible I'm over communicating even at that point using multiple forms of color coding to communicate your concepts so don't just rely on red and green thank you guys I think I think you're out okay cool um I was wondering if off the top of your head you had any recommendations for publicly available books or guidance on getting started in something involving the accessibility or writing accessible UI like for someone who otherwise has limited experience in UI design in general web aim has really great resources for getting started that's where I started was with some of the resources that webbing provides and they're part of the w3c WCAG type of stuff so pretty easy and considering that most of the regulatory bodies are now like piggybacking on to WCAG so take like section 508 wasn't it updated in 2008 there in the progress process of updating again to more closely follow WCAG but a lot of times they'll just be like and you what WCAG does because WCAG is like constantly improving and that allows the governments to kind of be freed up from having to maintain all of that regulation so that's why we talk a lot about WCAG is because most everybody is following it already thank you you might be on Jason I'm not sure yet shake she's coming this way Jason Kennedy everybody thanks by the way you're not in 24 years 27 right isn't that what we say that one more time the 27th I think was Compass Group it was like 2011 so my question is we have a lot of teams that have gotten a lot of development under their belt and probably are going wow this is really cool but how in the world do we get there so what is the what is the process from you know where most of us are to starting down this path adopting so we have an accessibility team here at Cerner I'd like to introduce everybody to Kim Easter house stand up cam so if you guys have any questions about where to start Kim is working and actually with abet got really closely with all of the like the DoD project that's going on and kind of understanding where all of our solutions like what level of accessibility I have to meet so she's gonna be your go-to gal there's also a new CERN group that provides a lot of background information on how to get started what tools you need from a developer perspective that kind of thing welcome anybody else first of all you guys are doing an amazing job for the user experience and like you're making actually the development process really accessible for the actual users out there but I have a question do you have you have like problems making design choices when you are making it usable that as well as interactive because there are a lot of new interactive websites out there but are they usable for you know people with disability disabilities so on the design side I actually find accessibility standards very freeing and that's because design tends to be very subjective I don't know I mean I don't know how many of you guys have a design background but somebody may like it and somebody may not like it so you have different opinions I mean Google even took about how many like 80 blues did they do some testing around for their hyperlinked colors I find that accessibility regulations help kind of narrow the focus down and so then you have a tool box ready to go so like colors as an example how many times can you go over with a different color blue well let's just make sure that it hits the official accessibility mark and then like to make decisions from there so I actually really enjoy having them help put a box around from a creative standpoint so basically they make it accessible first and then make it interactive on the top and then do all of your small tweaks because accessibility is beautiful yeah thank you you're welcome anybody else you're all hungry yeah I saw them like putting out all of the boxes so it's all downstairs if you guys want to go grab some lunch we'll see you later

Channel: CernerEng

Views: 4,573

Keywords: ux, accessibility, usability

Id: Aj2LSIjYVcI

Length: 37min 8sec (2228 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 31 2016