Re: A joint seminar with the usability community and the blind community

[phoenixl <phoenixl sonic net>]

Hi,

Here are some more questions that have been suggested to be considered
at this seminar:

1.  Which of the standard usability testing methodologies do visually
    impaired organizations use for testing usability and accessibility of
    technology?

2.  What modifications to the standard usability testing methodologies
    had to be made to accomodate visually impaired subjects?

3.  Which of the standard usability testing methodologies were found not
    not to be useful for testing visually impaired subjects and why?

4.  How do visually impaired organizations train their staff on using
    standard usability testing methodologies?

5.  When selecting visually impaired subjects for doing usability testing
    of technology, what criteria do visually impaired organizations use?
    If one of the goals of the testing is to use "lead users" as the
    subjects, what additional criteria are used for choosing these lead
    users?

6.  What usability testing do visually impaired organizations do to
    differentiate when universal design versus parallel design will result
    in greater usability and accessibility of some technology?

7.  Are there any ways where the usability testing of subjects with
    visual impairments can be structured to keep down testing costs?

8.  The ability to scan is highly important for efficiently interacting
    with visual user interfaces.  What usability techniques have been developed
    to compensate for a visually impaired person's limited ability to scan?

9.  What reasearch has been done for optimizing a visually impaired
    person's use of interfaces where the interface has a significant
    number of elements?  How much slower is it for a visually impaired
    person to use this type of interface as compared to a non-visually
    impaired person?

10.  What kinds of user interface designs are more likely to have
     visually impaired users be inaccurate in their interactions?

11.  Some user interfaces require the ability for the user to handle
     asynchronous interactions, e.g. multiple instant messages.  What
     approaches have been developed for visually impaired users to
     avoid falling behind in these interactions?

12.  What are key design requirements for visually impaired users to interact
     with chat rooms?  What are the additional requirements when the
     chatrooms are more advanced and can display multimedia information
     while the discussions are simultaneously occuring?

13.  What research has been done concerning online testing for courses
     with regards to what degree the online aspect of the testing
     negatively affected vidually impaired students' scores?

Are there any other questions that people can suggest to be considered
at this seminar?

Thanks,
Scott