Tutorial 2 Week 3
Accessibility and Collecting Data
A. Practical Exercises
There are 3 good reasons to take accessibility into account when designing websites and software –
· It’s the right thing to do.
· There can be legal imperatives to do so.
· There is likely to be a large number of disabled people in your target audience
Activity 1: Accessing Social Websites
Visit www.facebook.com
Create an account and add some of your friends to your friends list. What kind of information can you access about the friends? Report the kind of activities you would be able to carry out on Facebook in a paragraph to your Yola site.
You can access different information about your friends such as:
· Education
· Work Place
· Hobbies/interest
· Groups/and fan sites.
· Read their comments they have had with their friends
· And much more.
With Facebook you can connect with your distant and close friends through the networks that exist in your current friends list. You can play online games with your friends, so you can challenge them, and you can talk directly to them via chat. Facebook allows you to communicate, play, learn, and just have fun with your friends, and best of all you can make new friends via the Facebook friend search.
Activity 2: Walk in their shoes
If you can access a computer with a shockwave player and speakers use the simulation at
WebAim http://www.webaim.org/simulatirsons/screenreader-sim.htm
Try to find the phone number for the University of Antarctica If you can't access this, with StickyKeys on: put tape on the fingers of one hand, so that you can use only one finger. Sit on your other hand. Type a short letter.
Post a message in the Topic 'Accessibility' based on the following –
There is considerable difference between reading about a handicap and putting yourself in that person's shoes. In your message describe the experience of using a computer for a typical task without the use of your familiar abilities. Suggest ways in which we might be able to make the public more aware of this issue.
Copy the post to your Yola site.
1800-lrn-cold
1800-576-2653
When you put yourself in someone else’s shoes you always see another perspective. I had a terrible experience. It was frustrating, and confusing. When the numbers are said like they are in WebAim site, you can’t tell where the number starts and when it ends. Complete frustration. The way in which we can make the public more aware of this, is of course the WebAim site, promote it more, and also promote the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) so that web-developers area aware of the issues and how to address them in development. To many times design is favored over functionality, making developers aware of the WAI and others promoting accessibility issues will allow them to incorporate aspects of accessibility into their future work.
Activity 3: Collecting Data
Drawing on your experience of using blogs, bulletin boards, or chat rooms, how might participant observation online different from face to face participant observation?
The way in which participant observation online differentiates from face to face observation is by the loss of extra communication/information by not being able to read such things as, tonality, body language, voice modulation and various other aspects that make up human communication. Online observation is limited to user clicks, content of messages posted, click flow (How the interface is navigated), etc. Therefore the information we get back from the user online is very ‘digital’/step-by-step/objective, where communication face-to-face can have many meanings it is subjective
Activity 4: Translation:
Use the Google Translate tool http://translate.google.com to translate one of your previous answers into another language. If you can speak in this language, how well did the tool translate the text? If not, copy translation and use the translate tool to convert it back to English and say how well the tool did. Try this with another language. Which language seemed to offer the better translation?
Use the ‘Translate a Web Page’ section to translate an entire website.
Comment on what you found and the usefulness of machine translation tools.
The Google translator tool worked quite well! I translated English to French and then French to English. The wording was changed a bit, but in saying that the meaning still existed, which quite surprise me. This tool is very good when wanting quick translation. When I tried to translate a web-page though you could see that the translation didn’t really work that well, and the reason for this is because what might take three words to say might take five or six in another language which threw out the layout of the page. I do have to say though, from the translation you could get meaning from what the French text was, which I thought was quite clever!
B. Independent Exercises
Activity 5: Assignment
Go to questionpro.com to design a questionnaire using their set of widgets for a free trial period. Create a web based questionnaire for getting a feedback for a website. Notice the question with different designs, for example radio buttons, drop down menus. Check boxes and a 5 point scale. What differences (if any) do you think your various designs will have on a respondent’s behaviour? Ask 2 fellow students to answer one or other of your questions andsee if the answers differ if the same question had the two different designs (such as radio button and check boxes).
Report your findings for two questions in your Yola site.
I found that when I put radio buttons instead of check boxes they usually check the more general answer instead of a specific, and when the check boxes were used instead of radio buttons they selected multiple items that were more specific. I believe this would be because with the radio buttons they are limited to what they can choose, so they don’t want to be tied into a specific detail, where in the check boxes they’re freer with their choice so they can be more specific. I also saw this difference with the drop down box and the checkboxes. It would make sense as the drop down box only allows for one selection just like the radio buttons.