Inclusive New Media

Overview

Project background

The information in this section is taken from the original project proposal, submitted to the funders.

Why research accessible web design?

Inclusive New Media Design aims to contribute to the social inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities in the WWW. It will do this by exploring the place occupied by guidelines for designing accessible websites in the work practices of new media designers. These guidelines are produced by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C WAI), the organisation that governs the technical standards of the web, and, in many countries, including our own, they form the basis of legal documents to which new media

designers should adhere. Whilst there is much activity focusing on how to implement and improve the guidelines, and there is growing awareness of them as a result of new policy, more accessible tools and their acceptance by web design gurus, no academic research has been carried out with new media designers themselves to explore how and why accessibility does or does not get taken up. Little is known about the factors within new media design practices which affect designers’ perceptions of accessibility guidelines, or whether other approaches, such as the inclusion of disabled users in the design process, or highlighting exemplary and inspiring accessible design practice, are more effective in persuading designers to subscribe to the accessibility ethos. Furthermore, the guidelines are to be integrated into a process which is thought to be both intuitive and unknowable – creative design. Inclusive New Media Design will bring together these apparently contradictory forces – on the one hand, detailed technical guidelines, and on the other, intuitive design – by exploring the relationship and potential for compatability between the two.

Workshops and observations

Within the project’s two-year duration, a series of workshops will be run with approximately 30 new media designers with a spectrum of accessibility expertise, followed by work-based observation sessions with the designers. The early workshops will focus on problem-solving – they will be consultative focus group sessions in which examples of accessible web design are examined and accessibility guidelines are applied in the creation of new media design solutions. In later workshops, designers will be introduced to intellectually disabled users to compare the effectiveness of integrating users into the design process with guidelines training as a means of achieving accessible web design. In the workshops, participants get free advice and consultancy from the project team, and in return, they agree to the project team carrying out observations in their workplaces, analysing the websites they are working on, and discussing with them their approaches to accessibility within the context of the creative design process.

Through the workshops and observations, we want to find out about how easy or difficult it is to design accessibly, obstacles that web professionals come across, whether they are client demands and expectations, or pressures imposed by timetables, budgets or line management. We'd like to find out about the extent to which accessibility guidelines are being adopted, and particular accessible design challenges, such as dynamic content. We are also interested in the impact on the design process of viewing exemplary accessible design and working with disabled users.

We want to find out about whether existing efforts to get designers to 'do accessibility', like the WCAG guidelines, really work. If they're not working, we want to know why, and what else can be done. So we're looking for an honest dialogue with our participants about their work.

Results and benefits

The research aims to benefit people with intellectual disabilities, by identifying effective approaches to their inclusion in the WWW. The findings will be disseminated in academic domains through journal articles, and to new media designers and developers through a project website, web design publications and conferences. They will also be disseminated to the W3C and other standards bodies and aim to inform international efforts to enhance web accessibility for people with disabilities. The project addresses the accessibility needs of people with intellectual disabilities, because they are a group acknowledged internationally as historically absent from web accessibility efforts.