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Re: Monitoring JAWS adoption trends for testing/support

for

From: Léonie Watson
Date: Feb 21, 2007 3:20AM

Alastair Campbell wrote:

"There are hundreds of possible technologies that people can use, each with their own interaction style. Using only one could lead you to make design choices in one particular way. That way may not help people using other technologies."

I'd absolutely agree with Alastair's comments and add to them by saying that one person may use multiple access technologies. I use different versions of Jaws for different tasks, I sometimes use a different screen reader all together.

Designing for just one version of one specific access tech can very easily become counter productive from the user's point of view.

Regards,
Léonie.



-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Alastair Campbell
Sent: 21 February 2007 09:49
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Monitoring JAWS adoption trends for testing/support

Costa Avradopoulos wrote:
> data does not appear to exist (anywhere that I have looked thus far)
> for screen readers,

Hi Costa,

In five years of keeping an eye out for that kind of data, I have yet to find a source.

In retrospect, I actually think this is a good thing, for exactly the reasons your company wants this data:

> My company has decided to test and support only 1 screen reader, and
> that is JAWS.

Although it's good that your company is checking for accessibility, using a particular user agent (screen reader in this case) to make decisions can do more harm than good, especially if you are not a regular user of that technology.

There are hundreds of possible technologies that people can use, each with their own interaction style. Using only one could lead you to make design choices in one particular way. That way may not help people using other technologies.

Hopefully I'm not stating the obvious, but that is why the W3C created the guidelines [1], which even after 8 years are still a pretty good way of improving the accessibility of a web site. (Although I generally consider most of the 'until user agent' ones not applicable anymore.)

In terms of your goals, I would try and fulfil them with:
1. An initial scoping exercise after reading the guidelines, that leads to carefully considered changes.
NB: Read about the techniques as well as the guidelines [3]).

2. Creating a prototype or set of templates based on those changes
that you test with:
a. Technical checks against the guidelines [2].
b. Any available user-agents, preferably with people that use
them day-to-day.

I know that's not quite what you asked for, but I hope it helps...

Kind regards,

-Alastair

1. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/full-checklist.html
2. http://www.webaim.org/articles/evaluatingwithfirefox/
3. http://www.webaim.org/articles/


Kind regards,

-Alastair

--
Alastair Campbell | Director of User Experience

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