Accessibility 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 second 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: Eboy
The Eboy product is a presentation of design firm, Eboy Arts. Often, when it comes to web design, everything beyond the visual and interact is, well, beyond.
Here Eboy bucks the trend and provides impressive results, with an Accessibility variable value of 0.668, Nearly Comprehensive Accessibility.
Should Do
While the UseIt product’s areas of improvement lay in the realms of Navigation & Orientation and HTML Standards, Eboy’s efforts are best spent in their implementation of Scripting…
The onfocus event should be used in conjunction with the onmouseover event. - When using the onmouseout event, the onblur event should also be defined.
- The product’s user is best served by using CSS on elements that can be interacted with via keyboard, instead of attaching onmouseover and onmouseout events.
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]
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
