By Brian Still | Member
This column examines the ways technical communicators contribute to the development of more usable products, especially those used in complex, dynamic environments. Novel usability evaluation methods and design techniques, as well as those rediscovered or repurposed, will be the focus. Please send your comments, questions, and suggestions for future articles to me at brian.still@ttu.edu.
What would we have done without the mouse? First integrated by Telefunken with its TR440 computer in 1970, then followed in 1981 by Xerox's own version, it really came into popularity with the advent of Apple's Macintosh that same decade. Rarely have so many relied so much on such a simple device to navigate the Web or to use a variety of different desktop software. Part of our lexicon now as noun, adjective, and verb, we can buy any kind of mouse we want, even ones that don't even look like a mouse or those that literally do. The mouse is everywhere, and we take for granted that any computer we sit down to use will have one attached to it.
It seems a foregone conclusion, then, that the mouse has made computing easy for all. But has it? Yes, many wouldn't know what to do on a computer without one. Proof of this can be found any time you see a user frantically guiding the mouse back and forth in a desperate attempt to find the arrow lost on the screen. It's a true ontological crisis.
But there is a danger in assuming that just because a lot of people use it, and a lot of people rely on it, that somehow the device or product in question is usable. We must never equate ubiquity with usability. The fact is that an ever-increasing percentage of the population of computer users cannot effectively use a mouse. Some cannot use them at all. The statistics are surprising. For example, the U.S. government's Center for Disease Control reports that more than 60 million Americans have limited hand function due to a number of conditions, including arthritis. Consider other users both here and in international markets with different but equally disabling barriers, and we quickly realize that the mouse's lack of usability is not a minor issue affecting just a few. There are economic as well as moral reasons to consider alternatives to the mouse. And this is true for a wide range of products that we take for granted, in how we use them and how, in turn, we design them to be used, or even evaluate the effectiveness of that use.
To deal with this requires a refocusing on users that moves us away from an over-reliance on profiles stereotypically representative of particular market niches. Looking closer at the complexity of the human situation reveals not only that there are many people who skirt the narrow boundaries of what we consider normal or “abled,” but also that these people are more than just aberrations isolated in the darkness of the margins. Rather, they are a significant population, a population growing in number, with an equally significant need for technology and a buying power to match.
Let's remember these great admonitions:
- Know thy user
- Thou art not thy user
Once we see that there are different sorts of users in the forest that is the user community, we'll see that we can and should design for as many of them as we can, and that in doing so there may be positive ramifications for all. Just recently in the Texas Tech usability lab, we've begun pre-planning for eventual usability testing of different websites for which visually impaired users are our target population. To say that a lot of what we take for granted in facilitating a test has been turned upside down is an understatement. Setting up software so the users can engage the websites is just the beginning. We've had to reconsider our entire process of orienting the user to the lab, of explaining where things are, of looking for visual cues during testing, and so on. If anything, doing all this has made us think more carefully about how we facilitate testing, which I'm confident will mean that we do a better job of it, since any ruts we've fallen into over time will be exposed and smoothed. For the owners of the websites that will be tested, I, too, think that their sites will come away better for more than their visually impaired users.
Good accessibility comes down to user awareness, and that comes down to making your intended users part of your design and evaluation process from the very beginning. Call your users, interview them, visit them, ask them to guide you through how they interact with the world, with technology to do their jobs and live their lives.
Some people are already doing great work on this. Sean Zdenek, an associate professor at Texas Tech, is tackling the lack of accessibility in films, podcasts, and YouTube videos. We have come to rely on the speed of creation and the desire of users for more audio and video online to rush to make more and more media available as quickly as possible. But the result is that much of it lacks, for example, alternative scripting that would allow hearing-impaired users also to participate. This is compelling language from Sean on the subject (www.seanzdenek.com):
Students with disabilities are in danger of being either excluded from the new media revolution or accommodated as after-thoughts of pedagogies that fail to anticipate their needs. Too often, our excitement about new media, even when that excitement is tempered by sober reflection, leaves intact a set of normative assumptions about students' bodies, minds, and abilities. These assumptions operate behind the scenes.… Normative or so-called “ableist” assumptions about our students—e.g., that they hear, see, and move well enough or in certain anticipated ways to engage directly with course learning … threaten to undermine our commitments to accessibility and inclusivity.
As educators, we must make accessible design part of our curriculum when teaching media creation. As practitioners, we must make accessibility awareness part of our design process. Yes, there still remain few laws on the books, outside of the federal government, to force us to craft accessible alternatives. But lawsuits are increasing for those who presume a far too narrow idea of who their audience is. It is absolutely crucial to understand that a greater recognition of the need for accessibility, as well as a commitment to understanding the diversity of the audience and its different needs, can only mean that what we ultimately develop and make available as products will be better, more useful and usable, for a richer sense of the user population.
A final example from our lab's recent work crystallizes this. We are an academic shop. What money we have, and there isn't much of it, goes to paying graduate assistants. We do not charge a lot because of the research nature of what we do, and so when we are confronted with challenges that might normally require a decent-sized budget to address, we either must be creative or go without.
In addition to our testing of products, we also teach, and last year, at almost the same time, both a client and a student came to us asking about eye-tracking software. As Jakob Nielsen (among many others) has noted, eye-tracking as a methodology can prove to be very useful in understanding what users are doing when interacting with a product such as a Web page. Unfortunately, most of the better software to facilitate eye tracking is expensive—really expensive.
Knowing we couldn't buy the software, but needing a solution, we first experimented with free or open source eye-tracking software. There were multiple solutions, but not any that offered a workable possibility. We kept searching, however, and began to work on our own in-house, built-from-scratch invention. Today, after a lot of frustration, hard work, missteps, back steps, and a little luck, we're in the early stages of testing what we call EyeGaze. Once it goes live, we think it will be a very affordable eye-tracking product for ourselves or others interested in eye-tracking but who have a limited budget.
In our experimenting to create EyeGaze, we also figured out that if you can track where users are looking, you can let their eyes control the cursor just as, ironically, a mouse does. A number of smart people have come up with solutions similar to this in the past few years. What separates ours from the rest, without giving too much away of how it works, is its affordability and its dependability. Whereas many technologies require users to keep their heads perfectly still or risk having to re-calibrate their eyes every time, our product calibrates without the need for re-calibration. Focusing on eye, not head, control also makes it more precise.
We think a large population of users who cannot use the mouse are being left out. But their eyes might provide an alternative that their hands, given present technology, cannot. And since eyes are faster than hands, this software may offer users not just getting something almost as good but something better. In addition to disabled users, users who have no problem using a mouse but want an enhanced training or gaming experience, might be able to use the same invention to improve the speed, the intensity, and thus the overall quality of their experience.
Thinking about alternatives and focusing on solving problems for all users is not, therefore, an obstacle. Heightened user awareness of all potential users and of all user limitations does more than make technology accessible for some. It makes it better for all.
