Who You Calling A Jesse?

As part of an ongoing process to improve the usability and accessibility of the UW home page, I met with two students on Friday that rely upon adaptive technology to navigate the web. There were three main topics discussed:

1. The UW home page was updated recently, have you noticed any improvements?
2. General web browsing: how do you navigate the web, what do you like about web sites, what don’t you like?
3. Do you have specific issues with the adaptive technology you rely upon?

What struck me right away was the response to the first question – “I don’t use UW web pages because they are so bad.” I then asked what makes them so bad? “JAWS reads everything so it is hard to use anything.” I also received comments about the menus all being in javascript which are useless to JAWS. The other student uses ‘text zoom’ to access pages but remarked the drop downs were frustrating because “If I just moved the mouse a little bit in the wrong place I had to start over again.”

I had some idea how bad things were, I have gone through pages with JAWS and watched one of the students navigate with it. What I really had no idea about is how these students blame JAWS not the web developer yet they do not complain. I wonder how many others out there have problems with web pages and don’t complain?

I suggested to the students that they take a look at the new UW web pages and get back to me. That will be posted. I also let them know that at the bottom of UW web pages is a ‘feedback’ link. If they have a problem with any content (PDF’s, and Word Docs included) they should complain. I know its hard for web folks to separate the whinge from the constructive complaint, but web folks on campus should pay attention to their feedback. If you run into a problem you can’t figure out a solution to please email me.

We did talk about other things and I have a few ideas and features to implement for the home page. There was a request for something like the Zoom Layout Joe Clark talked about at the @media 2005 conference and has recently received a lot of blog attention. As well as a contrast switching option. Just sketching out how to implement these ideas.

Oddly enough, last week saw a massive blog outpour of accessibility talk. Notable posts include the formation of the Accessibility Task Force,ATF task list by Joe,Veerle’s point of view, and the role of government in web accessibility.