ia play

One of our biggest challenges in rolling out SharePoint (and in many other projects) is getting an accessible rich text editor that our blind and partially sighted authors can use to enter content with.

We’re looking at XStandard, TinyMCE and Telerick RadEditor.

Any other suggestions welcome. I’ll let you know how we get on.

Most days it is a problem for the RNIB that most commercial IT software isn’t accessible. But there are some (very slight) perks.

One of my colleagues fends off lots of cold calls from all sorts of companies wanting to speak to various directors. The IT suppliers seem to be the easiest to get rid off as she politely asks them if the software is accessible (she usually has to explain why that’s important to the RNIB) and that seems to do the trick in getting rid of 90% of the sales folk.

The Right to Read campaign asserts that everyone has the right to read the same book, at the same time, at the same price. The ‘same time’ didn’t initially strike me as particulary significant but I hadn’t considered Harry Potter. Personally I wouldn’t queue at midnight for any book, just to read it as soon as possible, but plenty others would. Kids (and adults) want to be part of that, regardless of the quality of their sight.

One of the RNIB achievements that they are particularly proud of is getting Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince published as the first ever novel to be released simultaneously in Braille, large print and standard print. Apparently the publishers weren’t keen on releasing the novel to be transcribed before publication and needed to be reassured with promises of padlocked transcription rooms.

You can now get the Deathly Hallows in Braille from Amazon. But from the looks of it the same price mission still has a way to go.

RNIB training seems to include lots of gentle games and quizzes. Our sight loss training included a game that went as follows:

• Give participants the same information printed in different fonts sizes.
• Ask them to answer a question about the information
• Give the first person to answer correctly a metaphorical pat on the back (they need sweets here)

(it was more interesting than it sounds)

The idea being that you very quickly get what font sizes are easy to read. And therefore understand why all RNIB information is printed in 14 point and at first looks screamingly ‘loud’.

We all know we ought to be producing accessible websites and systems (nod here or you probably shouldn’t be reading this blog). I knew I’d learn about accessibility at a whole different level at the RNIB but what I wasn’t prepared for, foolishly perhaps, was needing to practice IA in an accessible way.

Alot of RNIB staff are blind or partially sighted so most project teams involve someone who doesn’t find traditional IA approaches particularly easy to engage with. My old colleagues would be distraught to discover that the solution is often MS Word or Excel.

Problematic:

• card-sorting (large print might work for the partially sighted)
• sketching (bad, particularly if your handwriting is poor)
• paper-prototypes
• any sticky note approach (I was particularly upset by this one)
• wireframes (can be laid out better, maybe a page description diagram would be better)
• sitemaps (can be done in Excel or maybe even Word. Not Visio. Ever.)
• user flows (I feel like there ought to be some way of making a user flow that screen-readers could follow, decision tree like?)
• alignment models
• swimlanes (maybe in Excel, although that sounds horrible)

Probably ok:

• freelisting
• nicely coded prototypes (none of your Dreamweaver muck, thank you)

I don’t think the odds are in my favour.