uAccessibility is the measure of how many differently skilled/abled types of people (including individuals with disabilities) in varying locations (e.g. mobile web) can make use of a given product. There exist many, very thorough, guidelines for determining the degree to which a product adheres to accepted accessibility standards. However, many can be very complex and time-consuming, also requiring the study of a good deal of the underlying code — much of which goes against the goals of the ‘quick’ part of Quick-UX.

Quick-UX

Quick-UX provides for the rapid, simple and quantifiable assessment of a product’s User Experience (UX). In answering the question of Usability, "Should I use it?" the sub-category of Accessibility represents one of the more complex components.

Today, we will look at the first of 2 examples of products with Nearly Comprehensive Accessibility, with a Quick-UX Accessibility value between 0.6 (inclusive) and 0.8.

Nearly Comprehensive Accessibility

Example: UseIt.com

Another product I could not resist evaluating is that of the Usability guru himself, Jakob Nielsen. UseIt is a comprehensive source for all aspects of Usability, across all media. Let’s see just how comprehensively it is applied.

UseIt received the following results from FAE…

…producing an Accessibility variable value of 0.636, Nearly Comprehensive Accessibility.

Should Do

Navigation & Orientation

• When using input elements…

type=text, password, checkbox, radio, file, select, textarea

… it is important to also use the label element with either (1) the for attribute to indicate which form element a label is bound to, or (2) a descriptive title attribute. For example, as demonstrated on w3schools…

HTML Standards

• The doctype declaration should be the very first thing in an HTML document. And when it is used, it is important to remember that DOCTYPE is case-sensitive…

Quick & Usable

Over the next few weeks I will continue exploring the ins-and-outs of a variety of products, and walking through real-world examples of the Quick-UX evaluation of Accessibility…

Comprehensive Accessibility [RoundHouse & FAE]
Nearly Comprehensive Accessibility [UseIt & Eboy]
Moderate Accessibility [Borders, Bloomberg & NY1]
Fair Accessibility [CNET & Drudge Report & NBC NY]
Poor Accessibility [GoodReads & Barnes and Noble]

Quick-UX Accessibility Summary, Charts & Data

Subscribe now (click here) to make sure you don’t miss any part of this series exploring the Usefulness and Credibility components of Quick-UX, the quick and easy method of generating quantifiable and comparable metrics representing the understanding of the overall User Experience of a product, as well as other insightful posts from The Product Guy.

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy