Access and Academia, Again

A podium, with its doors open to see technology inside, and a touchscreen control console on topLooking through my Google reader I saw that the National Federation of the Blind has filed a wide-ranging complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights over a number of accessibility failures at Penn State University. NFB argues that civil rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act are being violated, given the inaccessibility of PSU’s websites – including the Office of Disability Services – as well as their online course management software (Angel) and assorted other campus technologies. Coming less than a year after the settlement of suits regarding Kindle use at Arizona State and elsewhere, it’s depressing to see that the issues surrounding technology and accessibility have still not filtered through higher education to become central parts of technological development, licensing, or innovation.

Though many of the cited failures of accessibility are fairly common problems, it is their complaint about “smart” podiums that drew my attention. The touchscreen podiums in classes on campus do not have alternate means of interaction, leaving blind faculty dependent on others to control the lighting, multimedia presentations, microphone volume and other features of the wired classroom. I use similar podiums for teaching at my own university, and will be looking to see whether they offer alternative means of interaction when I’m back in the classroom on Monday.

As reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, there are hopes that this suit could be resolved in such a way that “Penn State and the Education Department would develop a template for accessible technology that could be adopted by other colleges.” Certainly, the Kindle suit resulted in a number of changes regarding pilot programs with e-readers, and commitments to only attempt to reinstate e-reader programs with technology that was more accessible, as well as a strong warning to other colleges. Though it’s lamentable that this is necessary, twenty years after the ADA, these cases are exactly the kind of potentially broad-ranging challenges that could strengthen the civil rights protections of the ADA and the accessibility processes used in US institutes of higher education.

In other ADA news, however, there was a hearing held today about the impact of instituting ADA compliance for small businesses. Check out the Justice for All blog for more details.

Thoughts on World Usability Day

Via @AccessibleTwitr, I saw that today is World Usability Day, and this year’s focus is on the importance of usability to communication. Now, of course, usability is not the same as accessibility; it is focused on ease of general use, for a mass audience. And, usability doesn’t always incorporate a universal design perspective in which the needs of those who face the most challenges are centered, with the understanding that products designed for that group may also be more usable by others.

That said, usability and communication is an interesting theme, as it seems to implicitly tie back to media accessibility in particular. In the Usability Day Charter, organizers suggest that usability is relevant at many levels – government, health, interpersonal communication – including entertainment:

But, even amusement benefits from usability! Incomprehensible remote controls, confusing instructions and blinking VCR clocks speak to the need for improvement in our media. Usable entertainment systems will make the experience less tiring and frustrating.

Interestingly, this section on entertainment is written about some fairly old new media – television and VCRs – but doesn’t touch on whether there might be usability issues with radio, film, recorded music, or other forms of entertainment media. Even apart from that, there’s quite a lot to unpack here – the charter is implicitly talking about hardware (remote controls) and a kind of literacy (confusing instructions), but it doesn’t really address software in terms of menus, navigation options and other features of digital television. What about the need for usability in online or other new media entertainment contexts? In streaming video? In content downloads? Or the usability issues of computers and the internet themselves? A recent study showed that 90% of users don’t know what a browser’s “Back” button does. Or, what about the need for greater usability in video games, many of which are no longer even particularly legible on a standard definition television? In essence – why has entertainment been defined in such a limited way, erasing many other fronts on which usability might become particularly salient.

In a separate article, the Charter addresses “communication,” this year’s theme:

We have more means than ever to communicate: phones, Internet, messaging and the printed medium. Technology that facilitates communication between people must be intuitive to use. It should have instructions that are easy to understand, and knobs, dials and buttons that do not require constant tuning.

This at least includes newer new media, but it seems to once again ignore the level of software; knobs, dials, and buttons each get a call-out, as do instructions once again, but the interfaces, code, and specific functionalities are left out. Now, perhaps this is done in the interest of generality, as the Charter is a statement of intent more than any comprehensive agenda. But I find it somewhat troubling to see the persistent focus on only the physical elements of devices, especially as more and more of them incorporate digital forms of interaction and production.

Insofar as these “usability” issues with the code, interfaces, and functionalities of new media are being discussed and addressed, it seems to be happening under the mantle of “accessibility,” as with the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which includes measures to simplify buttons on remote controls, increase captioning capacity on new technologies, and so on. Potentially, this could suggest that features designed for accessibility will be mainstreamed through their effect in increasing usability; a kind of universal design, whether intended or not, perhaps. And, of course, there are web usability professionals, like Jakob Nielsen and others, who have written extensively on making the web and its interfaces and code more usable. Many of these advocates incorporate accessibility into their usability work, as in the second edition of Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think!. Still, for World Usability Day to seem so digitally barren surprised me, and continues to push my thinking about how these issues overlap.

PS – The World Usability Day site has a pretty neat feature in which you can highlight some text and click on a pop-up to have it read to you (by a screenreader voice).

First Thoughts on Fable 3

I’ve been binging on Fable 3 for the past week or so (with a break for the XBox downloadable Costume Quest, which is adorable and Halloween-themed). I loved Fable 2, with its pastoral settings, funny reversals of some video game conventions, and a pretty straightforward hero’s journey that you could more or less ignore in order to become a master welder, marry a bunch of villagers of either sex, or go on all kinds of side quests.

Fable 3 is, in many ways, less satisfying than Fable 2, precisely because its ambitions are higher. Moving the story to the Industrial Revolution, asking the player to stage a coup, and then  to govern the kingdom of Albion should be an opportunity to expand and deepen the choices and effects that the player can make. Instead, the choices remain frustratingly binary – do I repair these buildings now, or let them crumble forever? There won’t be an opportunity to revisit this later! In fact, past the halfway point of the game, I never felt like I was allowed off of the rails; it’s an amusement park ride, not a piece of interactive fiction. Michael Abbott details a lot of the disappointments with the game better than I can do here.

That said, I was pretty captivated by the initial scenes in the region of Aurora:

The use of blindness – whether sand blindness or a magically-induced psychological or physical blindness – in this segment is unusual in that it actually brings up disability in a game that otherwise shies away from it. Designer Peter Molyneux always promises that players’/avatars’ actions and choices will change their avatars – in Fable 2, my poor fighting skills meant my avatar was covered in battle scars and scratches – but the games consistently avoid any real incapacity. My poor fighting skills should have meant that one of those mercenaries would permanently injure me by slicing off my arm or something, or my stamina should have decreased, or something.

My next quest is a return to Aurora, so I suspect that I will continue to think about the use of disability and avatarial embodiment in Fable 3 over the next few weeks!

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