Accessibility
User Research

Client: Classified

Project Introduction

Engagement was started to measure ease of use for people with vision disabilities using web applications. One set of application group was selected to start with.  The initial intended duration of this project was 1 year with around 300+ Internal/external applications, plugins, specific features of an applications, desktop tools etc. The project engagement with us as a vendor increased for three more years.

Project Goal

Project goal was to make certain number of existing products and applications accessible at a certain level of accessibility scale within 6 months of time.

Defining success

To define success for an application to achieve certain scale, we iterated the testing with same and different user groups will next scale is achieved. If the highest scale is achieved for an application and all the usability reports suggested highest score, the application will be termed as Accessible and Usable.

Process

Configuration

Why did you navigate the screen reader on this heading twice?

Is the intended purpose of the feature clear to you?

Can you try to jump to a specific page?

PURE Scores

Measures of Friction

PURE (Pragmatic Usability Rating by Experts) is a relatively new usability-evaluation method that attempts to sidestep these problems in a way that is reasonably quick, cheap, reliable, and valid. The metrics resulted from PURE can be used frequently and comparatively, making it practical to publish metrics for each version of a product or across a set of competitors, with just a few days of effort. 

Summary

I led 1.5 Year study for 15 Web Applications with a team of five. This study focuses on making web applications accessible and usable. Process starts when accessibility team test an application end to end and helps product team to fix the bugs. After on-boarding products from testing stage, no vision and low vision participants were asked to complete some discrete tasks and provide feedback on their experiences as per Think Aloud Protocol. I used to sit with participants individually to observe and record their response. 

My responsibilities included, on-boarding applications from testing phase, understanding products, creating tasks (scenarios), perform usability testing, creating reports, provide design and development changes.

Impact

Usability on public facing websites, user experience for permanent, temporary and situational visually challenged people is increased. We continue to monitor the usability of web applications and its scope to consider other set of user groups to achieve global web inclusion.