Accessibility Evaluations

An Accessibility Evaluation is the same as a Usability Evaluation, except that a range of disabled users are included in the target user profiles. Usability Evaluations and subsequent recommendations can substantially improve accessibility by making your product or service support task performance for users with disabilities. Interface IQ would ALWAYS recommend an Accessibility Audit being performed before an Accessibility Evaluation to ensure that the service or product is technically accessible before real users are asked to assess it. The reason is that if the service is not technically accessible users will not be able to access it to determine whether it is also usable for them.

“With current Web design practices, users without disabilities experience three times higher usability than users who are blind or have low vision. …Once we've achieved technical accessibility, our new goal must be task support and increased usability of websites and intranets for people with disabilities.”

Jakob Nielsen, Beyond Accessibility: Treating Users with Disabilities as People.

The benefits are similar to the Usability Evaluation benefits, but in addition:

• Go beyond technical accessibility and ensure your products and services adhere to the ethos of usable accessibility
• Discover if disabled users can access your site in a usable manner

• Discover if there are any common accessibility features that your service or product lacks
• Discover how your service works across a range of assistive technologies
• Discover how your site compares in terms of accessibility to similar sites.

This service can be used at the following stages of the product development cycle:

• Design
• Prototyping
• Code
• Test
• Deployment.

The accessibility methodology is the same as for the Usability Evaluation methodology, except that extra provision must be made for the disabled users to allow them to select the assistive technologies they require and to tailor it to their needs before the text.

The supplementary information and forms such as the Informed Consent Form and the Pre-test⁄Post-test Questionnaires also need to be prepared in large print and Braille.

Duration & cost are similar to the Usability Evaluation duration & costs, except that additional costs are incurred for recruiting and testing the disabled users, due to their special needs.

For a typical project covering one user profile, with 4 regular target users and 4 disabled users (participants):

Duration: 8 days plus 10 days lapsed time for recruitment of participants

Cost: £4,000 – £6,000

Activities

1. Recruit participants
2. Briefing meeting
3. Research plan
4. Conduct evaluations
5. Analyse findings
6. Deliver report.

Deliverables

• Research plan
• Accessibility Evaluation report, including analysis of test results, graphs of quantative information, recommendations on how to eradicate usability and accessibility issues, best practice information and results of questionnaires administered to participants. Why not view a sample Accessibility Evaluation report?
• PowerPoint presentation (optional)
• Preparation & delivery of video highlights (optional).