EBoard 04: Accessibility, design failures, and beyond

This class will be recorded! Its use will be limited to members of the class. Please do not share with others.

Approximate overview

• Preliminaries
  • Administrative stuff
  • Q&A
• Debrief on Friday’s Poster Fair
• Accessibility
• Sketchpad thoughts
• Ethics, revisited

Administrative stuff

General Notes

• Sam: Don’t forget to turn on the captions!
• I apologize if you find the multiple platforms I require of you to be inaccessible. Design is a tradeoff!
• I hope you had a wonderful weekend!
• I’m working from home today. I don’t expect my mediocre ISP to affect class (it usually doesn’t), but it might. (It went out once today already.)
• I spent an hour at a seminar by Amy Ko this weekend. She’s about as engaging as you’d expect (or as I’d expect). (As in very engaging and thoughtful.)

Upcoming Activities

• Community Circle Tuesday at noon or 3pm: Mental Health in Experience and Practice
• Karla Erickson Convocation Thursday at noon. “I/Robot: The Social Life of Machines”

Work for Friday’s class

• Do Investigation 2: The box or the room.
• Read Blomberg et al.: “Ethnographic Field Methods and Their Relation to Design” (in readings channel).
  • Link should work
  • Then try readings channel
  • Then email me
• Read (or re-read) the Stanford d.school’s Ethnographic Field Guide
• Read Beyer and Holtzblatt: “Apprenticing with the Customer”
  • On campus ACM access
  • Or our readings channel
  • Or email me
• Journal details and tasks forthcoming.

Work for Monday’s class

• TBD

Planning for Investigation 2

• Do you have good suggestions for the design of pairing for Investigation 2?
  • Sam’s design concern: Leaving people without partners, or feeling like they are not wanted as partners.
  • Done. Sam will clean up afterwards (he hopes). Mai recorded everying.
• How do you want to share on Friday?
  • Last Friday: Small group to give you time to talk and receive critique; full class to provide broad exposure and look for patterns.
  • This Friday?
    • Do just the big group. It was cool to see everything. And it was nice to have time. And we’ll have more time for each presentation, which will be fun. Make sure to leave time for feedback.
    • Do the same thing. It was nice to have individual feedback. and cool to see everything.

Q&A

Debrief from Poster Fair

• Design is (or can be) hard.
  • What happens if someone fails to mark the room as unoccupied?
  • How do you present a wide array of options in limited space?
• Pay attention to privacy.
• Those who specify a product may not be those who use the product.
  • That can lead to some fairly bad designs
• Lots of people don’t even ask if there can be something better.
  • Or don’t realize how bad the UI is until they’ve bought it.
• Different experiences / world views.
• Importance of aethestics or cost
• Tradition
• Multiculturalism is a challenge (Standardization is the first part of SRAW)
• Avoid Waste (the W in SRAW)

TPS

• Were there other common problems, factors, or issues to consider?
• How could you avoid them in your own design work?
• Other important issues to share?

Were there other common problems, factors, or issues to consider?

• There are a lot of things that seem to be impossible to do without instructions. Look for ways to convey info.
• There are conflicting goal/priorities: Cheap, Accessible, Simple (or obvious)
• People sometimes patch around problems rather than solving them.
• Some connection to the purchaser vs user issue.
• “Planned obselesence” (sam can’t spell) and ecosystems as design goals on the corporate side. (A few firms dominate the market and may collaborate to maintain that dominance.)

How could you avoid them in your own design work?

• Spend time observing your users so that you better understand experiences.

Other important issues to share?

• There are always tradeoffs to make; design is not a simple problem. “Remember that gamers are not normal human beings.”
• Should we accommodate all users at all times? (There are reasons not to do so, but universal design is appropriate.)
• Juggling accessibility and functionality. Is there a way to cater to all user bases and to do so affordably?

Accessibility

TPS

• Why are we considering accessibility (comparatively) early in the term?
• What is universal design?
• What do you consider some particularly useful UD or UDL approaches?
• How can you incorporate accessibility and UD in your own design work?
• What categories of inaccessibility did you see in Task 04a?
• Why do you think most of the answers to Task 04a were about access rather than accessibility for people with disabilities?
• If Grinnell enforced a single video-class platform and it wasn’t Zoom, what should it be and why? (Teams, Blackboard Collaborate, Webex)

Break

• Sam hates so many aspects of Teams. Why can’t I move people between rooms? Why can’t my TA control their own access to rooms.
• Congrats to Mai for winning HackGC.

Accessibility Resumes

Why are we considering accessibility (comparatively) early in the term?

• It’s an important topic.
• This is a course as design, so we should be thinking about how to design products that serve the largest group of people.
• It’s hard to add accessibility retrospectively. It sets a tone.
• Accessibility is a basic building block.

What is universal design?

• One approach: Something that can be used by the largest possible group.
• A core idea: When you build something to accommodate one group, it often supports groups.
  • Sam’s disliked example: Curb Cuts. Built for people in wheelchairs. Magically support people with strollers, workmen with two-wheelers, and much much more. (Unfortunately, until recently, were hazerdous to the blind.)
  • Captioning videos. Helps the deaf. Helps search videos. Helps non-native speakers. Leads to fun jokes.

What do you consider some particularly useful UD or UDL approaches?

• Captioning videos.
• Provide slides in advance. Helps the visually impaired. Helps those who lack focus. Being able to write on slides helps people rememrer. Etc. etc.
• Alt text for images on Web sites. Helps the blind or visually imparied.
  But also helps people understand why you put the image there. Helps you as designer think about why you want it there.
• These days: Auto caption or auto transcribe. Help the hard of hearing. Help those with attention issues. Provide fodder for jokes and distractions in class.
• Semantic HTML tags. E.g., using <p> for paragraphs rather than using
  to separate paragraphs. rather than . (You can provide some semantics through classes, but there isn’t really a standard.)

What categories of inaccessibility did you see in Task 04a?

• Traditional issues of accessibility for those with disabilities
  • Graphs may not be accessible to those with visual disabilities
• Aspects of individual programs (e.g., graphs)
• Structural choices (e.g., lack of standardization)
  • Advantage of standardization: Fewer choices, less software needed, less overhead in learning new software.
  • Disadvantage: Often using inferior software (or software not tailored to a particular context), violates some people’s habits/expectations. Flexibility is important.
• Bandwidth or resource issues
• Legal (or techno-legal) issues
• Non-technical issues, such as time zones

Detour

If Grinnell enforced a single video-class platform and it wasn’t Zoom, what should it be and why? (Teams, Blackboard Collaborate, Webex)

Teams

• Coordinates with the evil Microsoft ecosystems which we have adopted elsewhere.
• Broad functionality.
• “Given a choice, use the thing which has more functions.”
• “When you do a lot of things, you don’t do any of them well.”
• Whoo! Message boards.

Webex

• Only one thing. Better than the “Kitchen Sink” approach.
• “When you do only one thing, you are likely to do it well.”

General

• Audio and connectivity problems in ….

Jokes

• Something that senses when you are talking and automatically unmutes.

Instructor values

• Breakout rooms that are easy to manage.
• Seeing student faces.
• Giving students access to video chat.

Thoughts on Sketchpad

Sam thinks this is important because

• “You will see a designer effectively solving a problem step by step and he will not know at the outset know precisely what his problem is nor will he know exactly how to solve it. But little by little he will begin to investigate ideas. He and the computer will be in cooperation in this work.” The move from computer as calculating machine to assistant.
• As many of you noted, the model of computer graphics and interactivity does not seem sixty years old (other than slowness).
• Object-oriented programming before there was object-oriented programming.
  • Templates for objects.
• The power of constraints.
• Q: Why did our models of physical user input evolve the way they did?
• Q: What would have been different for the novice user?

UXPA Code of Professional Conduct

The UXPA Code of Professional Conduct is at https://uxpa.org/uxpa-code-of-professional-conduct/

TPS time

• Would following it have helped addressed Ko’s SRAW?
  • S: Interface technologies Standardize, erasing diversity
  • R: Interface technologies Reconfigure human experience
  • A: Interface technologies Amplify social choices
  • W: Interface technologies Waste
• How do you deal with unanticipated consequences?
• Does it address issues of accessibility?