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Re: Question on accessibility

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From: Holly Marie
Date: Feb 22, 2002 11:45AM


----- Original Message -----
From: "Kristin Evenson Hirst" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >



> Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, November 11, 2001: Beyond Accessibility:
Treating
> Users with Disabilities as People
> "... Many of the usability problems are very cheap to fix, especially
if
> designers are aware of the usability guidelines before constructing
the
> site. Retrofitting something that's designed wrong is more expensive,
but
> still worth it for a company that values employee productivity (for
> intranets) and customer relationships (for public websites). ..."
> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20011111.html
>
> Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, August 19, 2001: Did Poor Usability Kill
E-Commerce?
> "Summary: User success rates on e-commerce sites are only 56%, and
most
> sites comply with only a third of documented usability guidelines.
Given
> this, improving a site's usability can substantially increase both
sales
> and a site's odds of survival."
> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010819.html
>


Personally, and not joking here, I think Mr Nielsen's web pages and very
informative Useit.com articles could be punched up and even more usable
if there were some key graphics. For instance, for the non text only
audience and those that need visuals and graphics, those percentages may
have embedded more impact if there were some nice little pie chart
graphics or bar graphs on the side. Simple gif images would not make
that page load up any slower, and just because he has some good ideas,
does not mean he delivers his content in the best way.

Graphics, visuals, tools, and even multimedia are very useful assets to
delivery of content and learnable material.

Audio, Visual along with text increases both the attention and retention
of facts that are encountered.

Simple little gif graphics would hardly add a few k or so to that page.

Mr Nielsen could also work a bit on some chunking of topics and delivery
of key ideas and points with bulleted lists or less text. More
impacting.

Those are just a few thoughts I have, and I wanted to present.

My fear and I see it happening in many avenues, is people are
misinterpreting the importance of accessibility and in the process are
also throwing out some of the tools that help even more digest content
and information.

holly




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