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Um...where are my notes?
OK. Um...
That was great. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
So, I guess some introduction before we get too far into it.
So I'm Chris, and I've been working as a designer of software
for well over 20-odd years now
doing lots of different things.
A lot of time on the web for the last little while, mostly freelance.
I've worked with Telstra, Sensis, ANZ - all over the place.
I'm currently working at NAB on internet banking.
Is my mike working?
No. No?
What about now? Yes.
Excellent. And I'm Adam Kendall.
I'm the UX specialist for NAB.com.au
I spent most of my professional life doing tech support,
crawling under desks.
I hated it.
But I've always been fascinated by the disconnect
between the systems we build and the people who use them.
Been at NAB for a couple of years.
I'm also a passionate Melbourne Victory supporter,
which has nothing to do with this but I always plug it when I can.
And I think it's important to say tonight
that Chris and I aren't representing NAB tonight.
It just so happens that we work at the same place.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER, LAUGHTER)
So Adam asked us to share our view of accessibility
from a UX or user experience perspective.
So after tossing around a few ideas over a couple of coffees,
we initially thought that most often for us
accessibility is a technical issue...
..or something that needs to be addressed during implementation
or during build.
And then with further thought, we realised that good accessibility
required a lot more than just that.
So we came up with the topic tonight
that good design is actually accessible.
So that's what we're gonna talk about tonight.
So Chris and I have started to use a set of heuristics
recently compiled by Abby Covert at the Understanding Group.
Just a little bit of a reminder of what heuristics actually are -
they're not a set of strict rules, but they're rules of thumb.
They're a set of guidelines that you can go by.
They're intuitive judgements and it's...
They're really common-sense.
So we use them to evaluate the strength and quality
of what is currently offered to users.
We also use them to facilitate critique during planning design
and during development, or build.
We use them to predict
the effectiveness of a potential solution or design.
In other words, they're a set of lenses
that we can pass across our work
to make sure that we're designing from the perspective of our users.
It comes back to that empathy that has been spoken about
in the other presentations.
So the 10 heuristics identified by Abby are on the screen.
Findable, Accessible, Clear, Communicative,
Useful, Credible, Controllable,
Valuable, Learnable, and Delightful.
Obviously the one
that we're concentrating on tonight is 'Accessible'.
Can I ask a quick question?
Who uses heuristics in their day-to-day life?
Some people.
Has anyone come across this set before?
A couple of people.
They are relatively new but I do recommend
if you like heuristics, then these are great.
If you don't like heuristics, then these are great.
(LAUGHTER)
So the heuristic 'Accessible' -
so is it accessible?
Well, this takes a bit of a broader view of accessibility
than the traditional look at accessibility.
It's a broad view that all of us might usually take,
or everybody in our related fields of practice.
So it includes that traditional view but expands on it
to take in a more holistic approach.
So I'll just read out these questions.
"Can it be easily approached and/or entered?"
"Can it be used via all expected channels and devices?"
"How resilient and consistent is it when used via 'other' channels,
"whatever they may be?"
"Does it meet the levels of accessibility compliance
"to be considerate of those users with disabilities?"
Now that traditional sense that I was talking about before
really kind of concentrates on that fourth point only.
It doesn't take into account those top three.
So by thinking about accessibility in this way
or creating that lens that we pass across our work,
even from the really initial stages,
we can help identify problems that are in our designs.
So I guess my other thing that I want to do
is try and expand what we thought about as accessibility.
And this is something that I found really useful.
It's part of the reason I like these heuristics so much,
because they're a little bit broader and a little bit clearer than many,
and I think, like a lot of guidelines,
a lot of heuristics are very specific
and you get a little caught up in the detail.
So we thought we'd tell a few stories from different points.
So I'm gonna tell you a few to start with from my career.
So...what was I? 19?
I was designing software,
but we weren't making a lot of money out of it,
so I also did a lot of typesetting for a small printer's.
We had Macs in the office
and they were really good for doing that kind of design work,
so we did typesetting
for the local printer that we worked for.
So you were 19? I was 19.
How long ago was that? A while ago.
(LAUGHTER)
This is the only business card I could actually find...
..which is another accessibility story I'll come back to in a sec.
The issue was, yeah, our printer was a 65-year-old man
who had this old print shop that he'd been running for years.
He always used to complain about how stuff was too small -
he could never read our business cards and so on.
This is a pretty simple business card
even by today's standards,
but back then, you know,
it wasn't that uncommon to have two sets of addresses.
You'd have a fax machine, a phone line,
direct line, an office line.
Then mobile phone numbers started becoming common.
Then we had to squeeze email addresses on,
so business cards were always full and dense
and used to be a lot more dense than they are today.
I think...I don't see business cards very often.
They're not part of my life anymore.
Certainly not as much as they were then.
But he used to complain about them being really small
and often when they came off the printer
we'd finally see the final artwork
and because it wasn't zoomed up on our big 21" monitor,
we couldn't read it at all
even though we had, you know, eyesight that could do it.
I didn't plan for this, but as a sideline,
I actually went back and found all those files -
I still have them, strangely,
but I couldn't open any of them.
None of the software I had
would even remotely consider opening any of those files.
So I created that image
because the originals have been rendered effectively inaccessible
by the move of technology.
There's just nothing around.
I'm sure if I tried really, really hard I might be able to migrate them
but it's all this work that I've kept
but I've had no access to it.
So as I was thinking about this,
we also...were thinking about...
..how this affects me now.
I'm a little bit older than I was when I was 19
and my eyesight has always been bad.
I've had glasses since I was 8.
But it's never been quite as bad.
And this affects me every single day as I'm sure it does many people.
As I was thinking about this...
This is what I see in the morning
when I look at my shampoo and my conditioner,
'cause I don't have glasses in the shower.
I don't know which one's which.
Sometimes they move around.
'Cause, you know, someone picks a bottle up and drops it
and I've got no idea what's what.
So, you know, it's much easier when you've got your glasses on
and you can see it.
But it's my little, you know, constant bugbear about disabilities.
I never know which one's the shampoo and which one's the conditioner.
That's my argument.
I don't bother using them.
(LAUGHTER)
That's deflection. I wash!
(LAUGHTER) I do wash!
Alright, so moving on to something a little bit different again.
About...it was a few years ago now, before I came to Melbourne,
so at least five or six years ago.
I was working... I was trying to study, actually.
I was trying to do my honours
and people who have done those things
kind of want to take some time off
to actually dedicate to doing it.
So I was trying not to do any work, and it wasn't happening
because this guy was hassling me to come and help him fix his business.
So he had a lunch shop business which was very popular in Perth -
had about 20+ stores, was growing rapidly,
but they were having trouble with
helping their franchisors and their office managers,
which was costing them a fortune to support their stores.
They had staff running around on the phone, getting out there,
constantly complaints from customers and so on.
So they had hired someone in the year or two beforehand
to create a whole set of franchise manuals.
This was a big consultancy, they spent a lot of money on it
and they got their money's worth.
This isn't them - I actually don't have a photo of them -
but that's what they looked like.
And they gave everyone who bought a franchise these manuals.
Funnily enough, it didn't really help.
The sheer content - even though it was all there,
everything they needed to do was there in minute detail -
but no-one read it, no-one had access to it.
Certainly during the day.
This wouldn't even fit in most of the shops.
If you look at sandwich businesses, they're often squeezed into corners,
tiny corners of office buildings.
You want all that retail space to be used -
you don't want an office to hold all this stuff.
So over about nine months we worked with them,
I worked with them and a few people I found
and we split these manuals up and divided the content down to...
Well, it would have fit in one lever arch file if we had decided to.
But instead, we actually put it in five.
I don't know if you can read that, but basically we had five manuals.
One for the bakery, one for the kitchen, one for the counter,
one for the store and one for the manager.
We chose these areas after doing lots of in-store work.
Some of them sat next to each other.
In some stores, some of those areas were quite close
and in other stores they were spread out.
All the stores were different.
But all these things, all these different binders,
now could sit where they were gonna be used.
So if someone had a question, they could consult it.
And of course we also did other things like posters and tray mats
and things like that.
So we made all that content - which was very good.
We didn't really write any new content.
Honestly, we didn't create any new content,
we just took the sheer weight of content
and condensed it down into something that actually was manageable
by 17-year-old baristas and shop attendants.
And the manager who was, you know, desperately working,
trying to pay off his mortgage and everything else.
It actually gave them something they could use.
So, you know, we made it accessible through good design,
through good content management,
through writing and improving on those areas.
So Chris's two stories,
they're really about problem and solution.
Or three really, with the shampoo thrown in there as well.
But let's bring these back to, I suppose,
where a lot of us sit, is the online debates.
To a very current online debate, and that's the iPhone apps -
web versus native.
They're actually what we got up
when we searched 'web' and searched 'native'.
So what's the best approach for developing your mobile presence?
Is it web, or is it native?
Which approach is the most accessible?
And I'm sure over a few beers we can argue about it all night.
From the traditional perspective,
iPhone has legendary accessibility status.
Since it was released to the market, it's been raved about.
There's things like voice over that we mentioned before.
Native iPhone apps too can have great accessibility.
There's many, many examples.
And along with iPhone apps,
the iOS devices have enabled people to do more
than they ever have been able to do with a regular computing device
such as a PC or Mac.
But through...
If you look at it through that broader accessibility lens
that we spoke about before,
native iPhone apps are limited to iPhone owners.
You can't use a native iPhone app if you don't have an iPhone.
So therefore that renders it inaccessible.
Now, iPhone owners are still
a very, very, very small set of the population.
So maybe building a website is better.
Almost all devices can access the web,
so anyone who owns a smartphone can access your device.
So is the web more accessible?
So then we can switch it back around and argue that technically,
a native app allows better quality of access
than those offered by web browsers -
so is the native app more accessible?
So the point we're making here is
that there's always gonna be trade-offs.
You're always gonna have to cut one to add to the other.
There's no simple solution, and I think Kim mentioned it before -
the ultimate answer is "It depends."
It's a bit of a cop-out, but often it does.
So let's just come back to this heuristic.
Is it accessible?
So that first one - "Can it be easily approached and/or entered?"
So I suppose Chris's example of those huge folders -
those huge folders were inaccessible by most
just because of the sheer volume of them.
"Can it be used via all expected channels and devices?"
Native apps can't be used by all devices.
"How resilient and consistent is it when used via 'other' channels?"
Like in the shower, for example.
And "Does it meet the levels of accessibility and compliance
"to be considerate of those users with disabilities?"
WCAG. It's so technical, as we've heard about tonight already.
It focuses on code and the people who can use it.
I've got no idea how to code, I'm the first to admit it.
And I actually don't want to learn how to code.
I'm not gonna pretend to start to go and read the WCAG guidelines.
The point that we're making here is
accessibility is focused on the people, and so should design.
So one last thought, or question,
that kind of came as we went through this.
One other debate is mobile first.
We've got 'tablet first'
in our organisation at the moment, which is fun.
You know, how do you do this? And then who...?
I mean, is 'mobile first' familiar to most of you? Heard of it?
Do you understand the concept?
Does anyone wanna have a go? Why would we go mobile first?
WOMAN: Because it forces you to narrow down content
to the most necessary things.
Yep.
MAN: Because there's more access of mobile devices since last year
from a static base.
Those are great reasons.
Designing for small devices, though,
is much harder than designing for big screens.
It's much harder to put the same level of content
and communication there.
It asks you to make a whole bunch of decisions about what you're doing,
and that's one of the reasons that it's argued for as well.
So as we were thinking about that,
we were thinking about what we just talked about -
is it accessible? - and isn't that the same thing
as we were talking about before?
Aren't we just talking about making sure
that our content is well-designed
and well-structured and organised, that our IA is strong?
It's presented in a way that's communicative.
It's marked out and coded in the right way.
It doesn't seem that different.
So I don't know if this is a good approach to design or a bad one.
I haven't tried it.
But it's certainly something I'm gonna keep in mind
over the next year or so and see where it goes.
It's also about stripping out all of that visual design.
Like, for example, I thought about it on the way here tonight.
I thought, "How will I know if...?"
'Cause we've never done this presentation,
we just knocked it up in the past fortnight.
And I thought to myself
"How will I know if this is gonna be successful or not?"
And I thought I would just listen to the audio of it.
So strip out the visual.
And you can do that with your web designs as well.
Strip out the CSS and start to read through your content.
Is all the priority-giving elements on the page?
Does it make sense when you start to read through it
without any visual aspects required?
So that's pretty much where we got to.