AJAX, FireVox and JAWS (oh my?) and User Experience questions

[Colin Clark]

Hi Tom,

Glad to hear from some Kuali folks on the Fluid list. Apologies for the 
delay in responding, I've been a bit busy with the 0.1 release and 
conference planning.

Tom O'Brien wrote:
> One of the concerns from the Kuali folks is whether using AJAX is 
> going to present insurmountable or cumbersome accessibility 
> problems.  I've made a simple AJAX app and have tried both JAWS and 
> FireVox (even without adding in AxsJAX) and they seem to work fine 
> with the dynamic content (I'm also working through the Accessibility 
> Review Checklist at 
> http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Comprehensive+Accessibility+Review+Protocol+for+PC). 

DHTML does present significant accessibility challenges, but they're far 
from insurmountable and are something we're dedicating ourselves to 
helping solve.

I've been working on a checklist for DHTML developers, emphasizing 
portal-friendly techniques and accessibility. It's due for a round of 
updates--Michelle, Eli, and I gave a talk yesterday about the topic with 
lots of new sample code--but it should give you a starting point to 
think about DHTML/AJAX accessibility.

http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/DHTML+Developer+Checklist

The Fluid framework will provide JavaScript supports for helping 
developers make their components more accessible, taking care of things 
like focus management and keyboard handlers.

I'm glad to hear you've also found the accessibility review protocols 
helpful.

> One question is whether the Accessibility Review Protocol in its 
> current state is just necessary or is it sufficient to ensure that a 
> site is fully accessible?

Combined with AChecker and an under-the-covers assessment of your 
markup, I think the Simple and Comprehensive Accessibility Review 
Protocols provide you with a pretty good toolkit for ensuring that a 
site is fully accessible. These are exactly the sort of techniques we've 
been doing here at the ATRC over the past 10 years for website 
accessibility reviews.

> In my conversations with Allison Bloodworth we talked about the User 
> Experience Walkthroughs which seem like a great way to assess the 
> usability of a site.  The instructions and examples 
> (http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/User+Experience+Walkthroughs) 
> look like useful tools for Kuali to apply to the development process 
> but I'm wondering whether Kuali should be incorporating User 
> Experience Use Cases at the modeling stage so that they can be 
> applied to the business logic or whether applying them to 
> implementation process as User Experience Review is sufficient?  I 
> guess I'm wondering aloud if the Subject Matter Expert approach is 
> adequate to capture user edge cases?

I've always thought that usability and accessibility considerations 
should be baked in from the beginning. Modeling is all about capturing 
the needs of users in working code.

As you point out, thinking about usability from the beginning often 
changes the nature of your model code. In my mind, UX isn't just a 
UI-layer consideration; it affects the whole application stack, from 
model and service layer on up.

Definitely an interesting discussion, thanks for posting!

Colin

-- 
Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto
http://fluidproject.org