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 last of 3 examples of products with Fair Accessibility, with a Quick-UX Accessibility value between 0.2 (inclusive) and 0.4.

Fair Accessibility

Example: NBC New York

NBC New York’s online news product presents a visually pleasing and minimalistic user experience.

FAE’s evaluation of this product resulted in …

…with an Accessibility variable value of 0.38 and Fair Accessibility.

Should Do

While demonstrating strength in HTML Standards and Styling that went beyond the basic visual, there still remains room for improvement in the areas of …

Navigation & Orientation

• Beyond the importance of always specifying at least one <H1> element, it is equally important that every one of these elements contains text (as well as the subsequent <H#> elements).

• Button, Submit, and Reset form elements must have either a value or a title attribute set.

Text Equivalents

• While a common problem in many products with a heavy dose of images, especially news content with a constant stream of news and images, it remains no less important that every image should always be associated with a descriptive ALT text attribute.

• “Decorative Images” used to such effects as positioning, typically images with either a height or width less than 8 pixels, should either be rethought and redesigned or resolved using CSS techniques.

Quick & Usable

Over the next few weeks I will be 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