Web analytics in service of accessibillity

Web analytics tools are not ment to tell us anything about users with disabilities

Web analytics is a well known tool for better user experience. If we couldn't see how our users use our site, we would be quite lost in knowing how it works.

For a long time I have been playing with the idea of filtering users who use assistive technology to see how their behavior is compared to those who don't. Are they using more time on each page? Do they have the same amount of page views? Maybe we even can detect barriers by doing this. But assistive technologies don't make this easy because they don't identify themselves to the server. I find it strange that web analytics tools can tell me see how big screens the users have or which versions of Windows they are running, but I can't know if they actually read or hear the content.

It's hard to believe that I am the first person to think about this, so I started googling web analytics and accessibility. What I found was a wall of scepticism about identifying people with disabilities. Many of the arguments are well-founded, but it seems like many people think they know the intentions without really listening. This article wraps it up quite well.

These are the arguments I find:

My disability is not your business

People don't want "dyslexia" written on their forehead. I can understand that. I don't want everyone to know every detail about me either. People also fear this information can be used for commercial purposes like advertising. I still see ads for cycling glasses everywhere after I bought a pair several months ago, so I get their point. People want to protect their privacy.

But to be honest, I don't care about you. Not when I analyse web traffic. I care about you as a group, not as individuals. I want to find out how a representative group of users who use screen readers or high contrast mode handle our pages. If I discover that their conversion rate is lower than average, maybe there is an accessibility barrier somewhere.

We are living in the age of Edward Snowden. Even if I swear that my intentions are pure, others may misuse the same information. But how new is this really? If you are blind, I suspect that Google's and Facebook's algorithms already have figured this out.

I don't want to be treated differently

Some web sites have separate "accessible pages" in addition to the fancy pages for "normal" people. Nobody wants to be sent here. They want to play on main pages with the cool kids.

I don't like to separate the users either. I don't want twice as many pages to maintain. I'm a fan of universal design. One web to rule them all!

The numbers will be wrong anyway

When assistive technologies don't identify themselves to the servers, it gets difficult to track them in web analytics. It is possible with some creativity, but it takes different measures for different tools and some will possibly not be logged. Besides, detecting a screen reader does not necessarily mean that there is a blind person on the client. I have tested plenty of sites with VoiceOver, but I'm definitely not blind. I have also seen my uncle holding a magnifier in front of the screen. How can we detect that? We will never get the numbers right.

But web analytics is not about exact numbers. It's about trends. We want to see if a change is for better or worse, how long the users stay on a page, how many pages they see per visit etc. And now I want to see if these data are different for users with disabilities. All I need is a representative group. It doesn't need to be complete, as long as the deviations in the data are noticeable. However, we need to keep in mind that we are logging specific events, not users with disabilities. We also need to treat the data as what they are.

I don't want to be counted

People are not always happy to be a part of some home made statistics of the users' abilities. When I advocate accessibility, I'm almost always asked how many blind users we have. I must admit that this was the first thing I was thinking when I got the idea of using web analytics for accessibility, but those numbers would not convince anyone anyway. As mentioned before: web analytics is not about counting, but analyzing users' behaviors.

I doubt many people find anything suspicious in my intentions. If they do, there is a bigger problem with web analytics in general. The challenge is that the same identification also can be used for other, more dubious purposes. It's hard to make people count if they don't want to be counted.

How do blind people use a camera?

When I did some research prior to a speach I was holding with a colleague at Mobile Era Conference, I came accross a cool film on Apple's accessibility page. It simply shows a blind man taking a picture of a family with an iPhone, and VoiceOver told him how many people there were in the picture.

This is not breaking new science. Most modern cameras have features that automaticly focuses on the faces. The new thing here is that someone got the brilliant idea of combining this with a screen reader.

I had to test this, and it worked great! Simply turn on VoiceOver on your iPhone when you use the camera.

How to make your colleagues think accessibility

This post was originally published on FINN.no's tech blog.

What to do when your colleagues don't make accessible products.

When developing a website which affects the life of almost every person in Norway, accessibility should be a main priority. Norwegians who are not able to use FINN.no are unable to find a home without assistance. Accessibility considerations are too often an afterthought, and this can have profound effects.

In the Spring of 2014, a small group of employees got together to find out how to make our colleagues care more about accessibility. After two years, the measures we think work best are workshops, user tests, and automatic validation.

Workshops

On a workshop we reveal accessibility issues and discuss how to solve them.

At our workshops we demonstrate how FINN.no works for people with disabilities before we let the team members test it the same way themselves. People find this a lot more inspiring than memorising WCAG 2.0 recommendations and running automatic validations locally.

How to test

Scaling Pages

The simplest thing to test for is page scalability, both for fonts and for the entire page. Most desktop browsers make it possible to scale both fonts and page no matter how poorly coded the pages are, but on mobile phones it’s still quite common to lock page size to screen size. It must be possible to pinch zoom every page on mobile phones.

The Straw Test

Another simple method is to pretend that you are looking at the page through a straw. This simulates how the page will appear for partially sighted people who either have a limited field of vision or need to magnify the page to read it. This reveals relevant elements spaced too far apart in a way that will make it difficult to navigate the page.

Keyboard Navigation

Most pages are designed and coded with mouse click and touch screens in mind, and we easily forget about people with broken arms, motor disabilities, or other reasons for not being able to use a mouse. By navigating the page with only a keyboard, we test that focus on links and buttons appears in a logical order.

High Contrast

Many partially sighted people are sensitive to bright light or struggle to see the contrasts on a page. They often invert the colors on the screen or switch to high contrast mode. Check that your pages are still readable in these modes. If you are using sprites or in other ways put relevant information in a background image, you may notice that this disappears on computers running Windows.

Screen Reader

Blind people depend on a screen reader to use a computer. Most cell phones have a screen reader built in by default. On Apple devices this is called VoiceOver and on Android it’s called TalkBack. You can turn this on in the accessibility settings. It takes some practice to use a screen reader, but when you handle it, you are likely to uncover a huge number of accessibility flaws.

Devopers actually think accessibility testing is fun (but you don't really have to use a straw).

User Tests

By testing our site during the workshops, we uncover the most obvious bugs. However, we cannot know how it actually feels for users with disabilities to use our site. That’s why we run user tests with blind and partially sighted users. We have people who run user tests at FINN, but because we don’t know what it’s like to be blind, we don’t always understand why they react as they do. Therefore, we need some external expertise to assist us. We are cooperating with Blindeforbundet (The National Association of Blind and Partially sighted, NABP) who run these tests for us.

Designers, developers, and product managers watch the tests, which are also videotaped for further analysis. After the tests, NABP hands over the videotapes with a commented report and recommended improvements.

Automatic Validation

Our next step is to include WCAG validation as a part of our automated tests. There are several tools offering this, including Pa11y and Tenon.io. We are likely to use Pa11y in our first effort, because it’s free.

Automatic validation gives an overview over detectable WCAG violations, and may work as a KPI for accessibility awareness or even break builds with new violations. If all developers and designers pay attention to this, we hopefully will stop deploying code with new WCAG violations.

Read more about Pa11y and Tenon.io.

Is It Working?

Accessibility used to be looked on as some kind of geeky pedantry for something that otherwise works fine. This attitude has changed over the past few years, and people take complaints about accessibility more seriously. In an internal speech I once mentioned that many of our pages weren’t scaleable on mobile. The next day, three teams had fixed that. A blind user complained that our iPhone app didn’t work with VoiceOver. This was fixed before the next release (several hours later). Another user complained that our banner ads caused epileptic seizure. This resulted in a huge debate on our forums, but sadly we still haven’t found a perfect way to use banners in a way that make both users and advertisers happy.

Whatever we do, the most effective way to get our accessibility flaws fixed is feedback from the users. We are not perfect yet, and we don’t always find accessible solutions that make everyone satisfied. Knowing that a user is unable to use FINN.no is far more convincing to our managers than being told that they have a WCAG violation. So please, if you have disabilities that make FINN.no hard to use, contact our service desk. It takes only one complaint to put your problem on our agenda.

Referat fra CSUN Conference

Inngangen til utstillingshallen.

I skrivende stund sitter jeg på flyet hjem fra San Diego, hvor jeg har deltatt på verdens største konferanse om teknologi for mennesker med nedsatt funksjonsevne, The International Conference for Technology and People with Disabilities, heretter kalt CSUN, som forvirrende nok er forkortelsen for universitetet som arrangerer konferansen, California State University Northridge. "Alle" de store var med og sponset konferansen, inkludert, men ikke utelukkende, Google, Adobe, Microsoft og Amazon.

En del av årsaken til jeg deltok var at jeg også holdt et foredrag på konferansen sammen med FINN-kollega Lotte Johansen, og en konsulent fra Vision2Access, Stein Erik Skotkjerra, som har assistert oss mye gjennom Blindeforbundets prosjekt Teknologi for alle. Tema for foredraget vårt var hvordan vi sammen har jobbet for å bygge en sterkere kultur for universell utforming i FINN. Mottakelsen av foredraget var veldig god, da det var mange som kjente seg igjen i situasjonen og var veldig interesserte i å prøve samme fremgangsmåte selv.

Fra utstillingshallen.

Dette var kun ett av nesten 500 foredrag i løpet av tre dager, så jeg har ikke først og fremst tenkt å skrive så mye om hva vi kom dit for å si, men heller hva vi lærte. Allerede på flyet fra London til San Diego kunne vi se at de var mange som var på vei til samme konferanse. Blinde mennesker med stokk er enkle å få øye på.

Ikke minst på Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotell, hvor konferansen holdes, kunne man føle seg omringet av blinde mennesker. Man må se hvor man går for å ikke snuble i stokkene deres. Kommer de fra flere kanter samtidig kan man fort føle seg omringet. Det er kanskje ikke pent å le av dette, men når Stein Erik, som selv er blind, med glimt i øyet kunne fortelle om at omvisningen for blinde på hotellet stadig måtte avbrytes av leteaksjoner etter folk som hadde kommet bort fra flokken og gått seg vil, så må vi kunne smile litt av dette vi også.

Konferansen ble gjennomført på en litt annen måte enn jeg er vant til. Foruten en egentlig ganske intetsigende Keynote kvelden før selve konferansen brøt løs, var det lite som ellers samlet alle deltakerne. Det var ingen felles lunsj under konferansen, og verst av alt, det var knapt kaffe å oppdrive uten å stå i lang kø i hotellets butikk eller løpe til nærmeste Starbucks. Dagene i forveien hadde det vært noen workshops for de som hadde betalt ekstra for å være med på dette, og dagen etter var det atter noen workshops som skulle løse noen spesifikke problemstillinger. Om kveldene ble det arrangert tweetup, accessible karaoke og andre nettverkingstiltak.

Ved hotellets lobby var det en stor utstillingshall hvor bransjen kunne presentere det nyeste av teknologiske hjelpemidler. Det sies at også Stevie Wonder tok turen innom denne messen for å shoppe. Selv fikk jeg med meg et elektrisk massasjeapparat som jeg håper jeg får til å virke like bra som jeg fikk den demonstrert.

Celebert besøk skaper begeistring

Men hovedingrediensen var de nesten 500 foredragene som det var 15 til 20 av hver time. Det var med andre ord litt av en jobb å finne ut hvilke foredrag man ville høre. Jeg skal ikke skrive om noen foredrag enkeltvis, men noen trender pekte seg ut. Mest interessant er det kanskje at det jobbes med en utvidelse av WCAG 2.0 med tanke på mobiltelefoner og andre trykkskjermer. Dette var også en del av budskapet til konferansens store rockestjerner: Karl Groves og Billy Gregory, populært kalt The Viking and The Lumberjack. Deres foredrag handlet egentlig om alt som er galt med WCAG, men at det ikke finnes noen bedre løsning heller. Noe av problemet var at det nye tillegget skal være valgfritt, ikke obligatorisk.

The Viking and The Lumberjack illustrerer hvor mye tekst det er i WCAG 2.0.

Vikingen Karl Groves lanserte også et nytt uttrykk: extreme accessibility. Dette låner prinsippene fra extreme programming, men med fokus på tilgjengelighet. Flere pratet om at de hadde laget universelt utformede mediaspillere, deriblant BBC. Andre hadde laget javascript eller add-ons som "reparer" sider som ikke er tilgjengelige. Atter andre hadde bygget WCAG validering inn i testrammeverket sitt, blant annet med Pa11y, som vi håper vi snart kommer i gang med også hos FINN. Og så var det noen foredrag som overlappet vårt eget, nemlig hvordan man kan bygge en kultur for tilgjengelighet innad i organisasjonen. Stein Erik hadde dessuten enda et et foredrag i tillegg til vårt, som handlet om at brukertester blir mer effektive hvis man passer på å inkludere testpersoner med nedsatt funksjonsevne.

Fornøyde etter et vellykket foredrag.

Foredragholderne er for det meste folk som oss, som jobber med utvikling eller har en dedikert rolle som accessibillity manager eller liknende. Det betyr at nivået på foredragsholderne varierer fra vårt nivå (kanskje enda lavere) til alfahanner som The Viking and The Lumberjack, som tilsynelatende holder foredrag like ofte som Bruce Spingsteen holder konserter.

Hvis dette alene ikke er nok til å friste deg til å delta på CSUN neste år, så kan det også nevnes at San Diego er en veldig fin by. Dette kan du lese om i reisebloggen min.