Scenario Girl

Ask the user

A couple of months ago I was asked to conduct some user research on the Australian IT website. The primary user profile for the evaluation was identified as blind users who accessed the web with screen reading software, and preferably included some users who were regular readers of The Australian or The Australian IT.

Recruitment was a cinch but the part about finding blind users who read The Australian IT wasn’t. Now it was just an educated guess at first, but given the state of the site up until that point, it was pretty unlikely that content was presented in a usable format for blind readers. So it was no real surprise that I wasn’t able to find anyone who read it via a screen reader.

The back story

To put this all in context though, up until very recently there really haven’t been many news sites that publish content in an accessible manner. SMH was probably the first to do so in Australia, but recently News Digital Media has stepped up and taken first place in providing online news content with a real focus on user experience.

Even so, the nature of news sites is such that they’re often crammed with content sections on the first and second levels of the site. Even sites built with a focus on usability, accessibility and semantics can end up with pages that are cumbersome and slow to navigate.

You see, while headings and lists can greatly enhance page navigation, an over use can quickly diminish any real value they may offer. This is because users of screen readers often scan a page via an alphabetic list of page headings or link labels. Ideally each will have a unique name, but even when they do, long lists become tiresome to read.

But back to my point, I digress.

RSS to the RSScue

An interesting comment was made by two of the four participants during the evaluation I was running on the Aus IT site: the SMH offers a text only version of the site, which the Aus IT does not. While one of the participants chose not to use it, the other loved it. The only draw back she mentioned was that it was impossible to respond to the Letters section of the site in the text version, which could have been solved with a simple hyperlink.

It was right about then I started thinking more about using RSS to enhance the accessibility of site content.

If users are able to easily select a feed for their favourite sections of a news site (or any other information site), will that enhance their interaction with the site as well as improve overall access to information? The beauty of RSS aggregators is that they list articles chronologically and retain any hyperlinks that exist within an article (unlike the text version of the SMH). It’s also very easy to create them for any number of site sections and many sites these days even offer a categorised page listing of site feeds.

More Research

So having given this a bit more thought, I decided to conduct some user research specifically around the use of RSS by blind users. The sort of general information I’m looking for relates to:

• Whether or not blind web users are aware of RSS and know how it’s used.
• The number of blind users who are already using RSS to access and read web content.
• Whether RSS improves access to web content for blind users.
• What the preferred RSS aggregators are for blind users and which offer greater accessibility overall.

I expect to have some more solid information over the next couple of weeks, which I’ll write up here. I think it’s going to be really interesting and I’m particularly keen to see how this might effect the consumption of news online. I also wonder if it might just be a matter of promoting RSS aggregators as an alternative option to accessing content like this.

Whatever the case, it’s always far more interesting to find out directly from the users… so I’ll keep you posted.