Ebsco Study on Usability for Students with Print Disabilities

Yesterday a group of us at work got together to participate in the webinar EBSCO Accessibility Study on User Experience, presented by Jill Power, Ebsco technical product manager.

This webinar was not only enlightening regarding the ways in which students with print disabilities use Ebsco products, but in general how they do research, navigate graphic user interfaces, and what tools they use to do so. 

Here is a brief digest of the findings:

• WCAG compliance ≠ accessibility 

• Accessibility ≠ WCAG compliance 

(For example, strident use of alt tags with images can impede the use of a webpage if they do not bring value to the visually impaired user. Ask yourself the question, what value do these alt tags bring, or are they repetitive?)

• No vision users use screen readers

• Low vision users use magnification and text to speech 

• Accessibility a journey, not a destination--there is always room for continue improvement 

• Ebsco Discovery Service (Fusion at my library) provided a positive experience for the participants in the study. The ease of doing some tasks should be improved, but overall, users could get what they needed and trusted the academic scope of the content. 

• Manual testing should still be employed, regardless of advances in automated testing. Each user drew on different tools and techniques and insight into those behaviors was enlightening. 

One visually impaired student said she really likes Google because the result display is high contrast and very well organized. I think as librarians we tend to think of reasons to use or not use Google for different reasons (mostly related to the content of the search results, questions of credibility of results, and mercenary driving forces like Google ad revenue). However, the Google result page still displays dark blue, dark green, or dark grey text on a white background (high contrast), unlike many sites that have switched to light grey text; furthermore, the Google result page is not muddied with floating ads or pop-ups urging viewers to sign up for an email list or another call to action, which often confuses the screen readers that visually impaired users employ.  

Screenshot of Google result page from August 3, 2017

The takeaways:

• Focus on accessibility rather than compliance

• Take a hands-on approach

• Remember the student's goal (write the paper)

• Consider the overall experience 

Some free tools:

• Accessibility tools that come in Mac OS 

• WAVE browser plug-in 

• NAVD screen reader -- free alternative to JAWS

After the webinar, a few of us discussed the webinar's takeaways in context of our workplace, and our role vs. that of the office of Student Disability Services. Sounds like there is interest in hosting the SDS folks for a library presentation to find out more! 

My own personal takeaway is to look into changing the text color on my blogs and website to improve the contrast--I am guilty of using grey text for both!