Design for all… except design students

The Irl-DeAN’s Design for All event went brilliantly last week. IBM’s Extreme Blue students showcased two projects. One, demonstrating an age friendly way of merging web and multimedia technologies so as to remove the fear of unfamiliar devices and complexities and replace them with peripherals comfortable and known to elderly users in particular.

The second, showcased attempts at making virtual worlds accessible. The project featured voice interpretation of the users surrounding environment and a 3D sonar soundscape for finding locations.

Queens University Belfast showed off some amazing stuff. Navigating and route mapping indoors via audio output and sensory input of the building the user is in. Interpreting map information for blind users, the map was taken in one application where a large range of information could be added.

A sight impaired user can then retrieve this information by exploring the area of the image, upon encountering an area of importance the user receives the information through sound. A graphics tablet was demoed to provide a user with absolute positioning, meaning a mental image can be built up of certain places in relation to others.

Possibly the most interesting out of the three for me was finding a way to describe the visual layout of a site to a blind user. The layout of any web site is linear, for a blind user. Screen readers read through a web page top to bottom, left to right. So, spatial information can be lost in this translation.

To provide a different means of interpreting a web site’s layout different sounds were associated with different elements of a page. By explaining the meaning of the sounds, a video showed a blind user actually able to sketch out the rough layout of the web page, fairly impressive!

I had the chance to showcase accessible web design. To keep it simple but try and get the message across I put together two simple pages, one good, one bad, to highlight some of the straight forward steps taken that make a huge difference in terms of accessibility. I was happy with the response, the idea seemed to click with most. I then had a design student come up to me fairly enthusiastically and the following conversation ensued…

Enthusiastic design student: ‘Accessibility, this is what I came here to see, I have an assignment due on web accessibility…’

Very happy me: ‘Do you have any questions in particular?’ (Score, I can be of some help here)

Design student: ‘It’s the thing where you put the hidden thing in the images for blind people’

me: ‘That’s one thing, yes, there’s a little more to it, here’re a couple of good resources…’

Design student (now halfway across the room): ‘Cheers bud’

Confused me: (What just happened there…?)

And that was it, he just kind of wandered off mid sentence and I hadn’t really said a word to him. It turned out a couple of his fellow students were with him, they wandered over a little later but it must have been bad timing or something because the ceiling tiles became incredibly interesting all of a sudden.

Not that I care if people find accessibility interesting or not, it’s not my place to be preachy and awareness can be as powerful as advocates of the initiative, but when the only potential future designers of the web have the least interest good design, it worries me a little. Surely college is the time to place a little importance on good practice and standards.

Brent Grainger and myself have to opportunity to speak to a Multimedia class about web accessibility in the coming weeks, it’ll be interesting to see what their general opinion is…