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Re: Web Analytics

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From: Tim Harshbarger
Date: Apr 10, 2012 11:38AM

Jared makes good points. I will try to make another good point.

One of the big issues with this approach isn't technical but social. People with disabilities have experienced and do experience discrimination based on their disability. One thing people with disabilities seem to prize on the internet is having the opportunity to interact with other people and organizations without their disability becoming known. While it might be hard to believe in this day and age, interactions with organizations and other people can be qualitatively different if disability isn't one of the factors.
Another factor in this attitude might be too many well intentioned people with little understanding. Basically, this approach is like saying "trust me, I know exactly what you need." I expect we all here are in a better position to understand what the user might need or want--but I expect everyone on this list with a disability has stories about well-intentioned people who felt they should make a decision on behalf of a person with a disability--and things ended up in disaster. But I am just guessing about this part.

So, the population we want to design user interfaces for is going to be somewhat resistant to us trying to determine if they have a disability and then prescribing their user experience for them based on that information. I even suspect that most of them would be more comfortable answering a question like "Do you want white text on a black background?" rather than "Are you a person with a visual impairment?"--not to mention it probably will get more answers since not all people we might define as having a disability define themselves as having a disability.

I do realize that when we design user interfaces, we have to make decisions based on what we think the users might need or want. I just think that people with disabilities would see a big difference between universal design and AT sniffing.

That is just my two cents worth--or the denomination of your own choosing.

Tim


I definitely understand the desire of some of the people in this community to want that information about users--we all want to be able to give people the best user experience we possibly can design. With this approach, I think the problem we run into is people with disabilities have had a lot of bad experiences with that identification approach. Screen reader only pages, anyone?