WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Accessibility user testing

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Jul 19, 2016 12:30PM

Some people have mentioned running remote sessions using screen sharing. I'm not at all keen on that. I like to see what keystrokes participants are using and what they are doing with the mouse. I also like to see their expression and body language - it tells you so much more than their words alone. Because of this, we used to do all our user testing in people's homes although we now do quite a lot in our in-house UX lab.

Whilst I agree that the focus should generally be on whether people are successful in completing the scenarios you give them, bear in mind that it only shows that the scenario *can* be completed successfully. It does not mean that all users with the identical disability *will* be able to complete it. So much depends on their preferred strategies for navigating websites and individual pages. Many times I have seen people complete tasks on websites that we considered to have poor accessibility, just because the accessible parts of the website matched their preferred strategies.

For this reason I recommend supplementing user testing with an expert review with assistive technologies that methodically goes through all the content. Neither is a complete solution but together they are about as good as you can get (assuming you have already done WCAG compliance testing to achieve a good level of technical accessibility).

Steve Green
Test Partners Ltd