User Videos – An Accessibility Angle
Over the last few months WP dev lessbloat has done a series of videos where he has invited in ‘real-life’ users to try out various features of the WordPress backend – and has videoed the experience.
I’ve watched many of these videos and read the transcripts of the interactions and they are a really great insight into usability, and assumptions that developers make about how much users understand about what’s expected of them. The most recent one is at: http://make.wordpress.org/ui/2013/01/09/two-more-menus-user-tests-focusing-on-this/
I’ve often thought that it would be quite revealing if somehow we could produce a series of videos of blind and motor impaired users trying out key bits of the admin area. These would highlight the accessibility issues perhaps more than words on a page could, and could constitute a powerful benchmark on which to base future improvements.
Does anyone else think this might be useful? And if so, how could we go about making some?
Joseph Karr O'Connor 10:31 am on January 11, 2013 Permalink
User testing is a powerful tool and can be very revealing.
When the users being tested are local, for this type of usability testing I use Silverback by Clearleft Limited. It captures screen actions and embeds a video of the user in the frame. The user is captured by the built-in camera in the computer. Silverback is for Mac. http://silverbackapp.com
This is not the only scenario. Remote user testing is also available. Here is an article listing some of the companies that do this: http://www.actualinsights.com/2012/free-remote-user-testing/
Finally, asking for free participation in such studies is a sensitive issue in the disability community.
The CSUN conference is coming up soon. I will devise some tests – I will take input from this group about the focus of those tests. I will put out a call for people to meet with me at the conference to do some testing. I will capture the experience with Silverback. I would like to offer something to participants – a Starbucks card for example – is there any budget for this?
GrahamArmfield 10:51 am on January 11, 2013 Permalink
Thanks for your reply Joe.
I’ve also seen some very useful accessibility tests of some websites that were done via sharing the screens over Skype and recording the results via Camtasia studio. Perhaps not as sophisticated but valuable nevertheless.
The issue about budget is a good one. I’m not close enough in to the WP organisation to know about that – Esmi may have to comment on that. It would be interesting to find out if lessbloat gets a budget for his vids and gives his paricipants anything.
Your idea about CSUN is a good one. For my money the focus should definitely be on things that are obviously not accessible – like Custom Menu Builder, etc. But it would be good to test the whole process of adding a new post with some media and some links and headings within the page. After all, that’s the key functionality that needs to work for everyone. Itwould also be nice to test things where the situation has improved recently after the tickets that got included within 3.5.
Another issue is how widely these videos are publicised if they ever get made. My natural gut feel is that full public airing is good – for knowledge, and as a spur to improve. But I know that perhaps not everyone might agree with that.
Joseph Karr O'Connor 2:36 am on January 12, 2013 Permalink
I’ll post the videos on YouTube and promote them to the accessibility and WordPress communities. I can’t do this alone. I will commit to getting people to engage in some focused testing. I cannot afford the time to CC the videos and provide audio description, which the videos will need. We’ll need someone to do that.
GrahamArmfield 8:06 am on January 13, 2013 Permalink
I’m willing to help with this Joseph.
Creating captions is not necessarily difficult but can be time consuming. But I’ve done some recent experiments and the facility within YouTube to create a captions file from a transcript actually works really well most times. Now it’s a lot easier to crowdsource the production of a transcript for a video than a caption file directly.
With transcripts, you or I can upload into YouTube to use as the raw material for a caption. It’s then possible to hack the YouTube caption file where the auto-syncing hasn’t worked so well.
So a possible workflow for each video would be:
1. Shoot and edit video, and upload to YouTube.
2. When someone has created a transcript we upload that to YouTube and go with the transcript-fed captions.
3. Where necessary, people identify segments where the captions aren’t synching right and one of us tweaks as required.
By the way, you’ll not be surprised to hear that the auto-captioning facility within YouTube is laughably bad.
Do you need to create a WordPress Accessibility YouTube account? Is that the best idea? What does everyone else think?
Joseph Karr O'Connor 7:43 am on January 14, 2013 Permalink
I believe we should start a WordPress Accessibility channel on YouTube only if we expect to regularly post to it. Otherwise, if I do a few user testing videos I can just post to my own channel.
Joseph Karr O'Connor 7:46 am on January 14, 2013 Permalink
Thanks Graham, I’ve captioned lots of videos and know how time consuming it can be.
esmi 11:54 am on January 11, 2013 Permalink
As far as I am aware there are no budgets available to anyone via wordpress.org. Where people do have access to user testing & video facilities, I would imagine that they are being provided as a form of sponsorship via their employers.
Joseph Karr O'Connor 2:19 am on January 12, 2013 Permalink
Will WordPress have a presence at the CSUN conference? I will see if people will attend a WP Accessibility group Tweetup.
Joe Dolson 1:47 am on January 13, 2013 Permalink
I’ll be attending CSUN, and would certainly attend a WP accessibility Tweetup.
Joseph Karr O'Connor 2:46 am on January 13, 2013 Permalink
Good man! I’ll start promoting it.
There will be a general Tweetup, look for info at http://www.csuntweetup.com/
Joseph Karr O'Connor 5:09 am on January 13, 2013 Permalink
The CSUN Tweetup page has not yet been refreshed for #csun13.
I’ll run the WP Accessibility Tweetup through my Meetup group:
http://www.meetup.com/Los-Angeles-Accessibility-and-Inclusive-Design-Group/
First I have to set a day, time, and location.
GrahamArmfield 8:11 am on January 13, 2013 Permalink
Unfortunately I won’t be able to come to CSUN this year – shame as I’d like to me you all. Hopefully next year.
I’ll be following CSUN tweets – though not necessarily live given the California/UK time difference…
GrahamArmfield 8:08 am on January 13, 2013 Permalink
Esmi, do you know lessbloat? Can you ask him how he goes about it, and whether he’d be up for doing any with user with disabilities? I’ve suggested it at least once in my comments on his posts but not had any response from him.
esmi 11:50 am on January 11, 2013 Permalink
I think this would be an excellent idea and is very much in line with my hopes of building up a pan-disability panel of users within this group.
Nelson 12:45 pm on January 11, 2013 Permalink
Joseph, that website you provided on actualinsights.com is great. I see that they have an app for iPads and iPhones–which to me, is huge. I had been looking a LONG time for something like this…..THANK YOU.
http://www.actualinsights.com/2012/ux-recorder-screen-recording-app-for-ipad-iphone/
Joseph Karr O'Connor 4:43 am on January 17, 2013 Permalink
Combining Reflector and Silverback for iOS Usability Testing http://bit.ly/V6zS3m
Sveta 9:20 pm on January 11, 2013 Permalink
It is also important that videos are captioned and transcribed for those who cannot hear. None of WordPress.tv videos are captioned at all – to say nothing about many other online videos on other websites.
Cyndy Otty 5:05 pm on January 12, 2013 Permalink
I don’t believe WordPress.tv has the ability as yet to transcribe videos. Though, even a separate text document/page/whatever would be beneficial in lieu of an actual transcription until something changes. Even something as simple as a detailed description of the video could be helpful.
Joseph Karr O'Connor 2:33 am on January 13, 2013 Permalink
WCAG and Section 508 both require that video be captioned. Transcripts may be posted as a stop-gap measure until the video is captioned. Detailed description does not meet the criteria for success. Captioning services can deliver finished captioning quickly and economically when organizations don’t have the labor to do the job.
The larger question for us all is: do we want to include all users, or do we find it acceptable that some are excluded?
GrahamArmfield 8:19 am on January 13, 2013 Permalink
Good question Joe. My view is that we should aim to include all users, but understanding that that is not always possible – certainly initially.
You’ll see my comments elsewhere about the provision of captions and how that could work. Cyndy’s point about wordpress.tv and captions is important. Captions isn’t the only accessibility issue with wordpress.tv.
I think signed versions might be something that might be hard to deliver on a limited budget, and I’m not sure about adding audio descriptions.
GrahamArmfield 7:50 am on January 13, 2013 Permalink
wordpress.tv has many problems with accessibility – eg lack of captions, and poor keyboard accessibility. It really needs to change.
If WordPress wants to host the videos themselves then they need to embed them with a player that is keyboard accessible and supports captions.
I’ve done a bit of work using the player that is available from Nomensa (http://www.nomensa.com/about/news-items/nomensas-accessible-media-player-20-now-free-download) which is pretty good for accessibility (keyboard control, captions) but with some limitations.
I’ve created a crude WP plugin that incorporates it which I’ve used on a couple of sites. It’s not on general release as it’s nowhere near finished. But it works with videos hosted on YouTube.
The biggest limitation of the Nomensa player at the moment is that for YouTube vids the player always uses flash which means that it’s not natively available on iPads and iPhones. However, if you’re hosting the vids yourself it can allegedly pull in the JWPlayer which allows delivery using the HTML5 video object on browsers that support it – should include iOS devices.
Maybe consideration of the accessibility of wordpress.tv needs another thread – it’s a big subject.
The WordPress Weekend Roundup - WP Daily 5:09 pm on January 12, 2013 Permalink
[...] User Videos [...]
esmi 1:51 pm on January 14, 2013 Permalink
Agreed – as that might be edging to wards the edge of our remit. One area that is definitely within our remit is to review all videos used in support documentation – such as those being incorporated into the new User Handbook.
esmi 1:53 pm on January 14, 2013 Permalink
Not spoken to him myself but I will try contacting him for details.
esmi 4:19 pm on January 23, 2013 Permalink
Update: Had a quick chat with lessbloat. He’s using usertesting.com and, as he works for Automattic, they are kindly picking up the tab for the tests. Had a quick look at the pricing structure for usertesting.com and it would work out pretty expensive if you wanted to carry out more than a couple of testing sessions.