ia play

This article is part of a (rather drawn-out)  series about our e-commerce redesign.

Competitive reviews do what they say on the tin: they review what your competitors are doing. They are particularly useful in a busy, well-developed marketplace where you can find good matches for your site/product.

With our e-commerce project, my first step was to identify what I meant by competitors. The definition is much wider than other charities for blind and partially sighted people with online shops. You are looking for sites that your audience will be familiar with, with similar product sets, with similar challenges and sites that may be interesting/innovative in general. They don’t have to be all of these things.

Some are easy to identify. If you are looking for market leading commerce facing sites that you can probably reel them off yourself.

You can also:

• ask your colleagues
• ask your network (Twitter is pretty good for this)
• do some Google searches (try searching for all the sites you’ve already thought of, this often brings up other people’s lists)
• look for market reports from Nielsen, Forrester etc…

I then bookmark the websites, using delicious. This means I have quick access to the set as I can reopen all the websites in one go (or in smaller tagged sub-sets) by selecting “open all in tabs” (I think you need the Firefox plugin to do this, I can’t see a way from the main site).

My four main sub-sets for the e-commerce project were

• mainstream shops
• charity shops
• alternative format bookstores
• disability/mobility stores

1. Mainstream shops (link to delicious tag)
These are sites that UK webusers are likely to be familiar with e.g. Amazon, Argos and John Lewis. I chose some for the breadth of their catalogue (a problem we knew we were facing) and some for specific range matches e.g. Phones4U or WHSmiths

Where these sites consistently treat functionality or layout in a particular way, I considered that to be a standard pattern and therefore something the users might well be familiar and comfortable with.

(it is worth noting that we don’t have definitive data on the extent to which RNIB shop customers also use other online shops. On one hand their motivation to use online shopping may be stronger than average UK users as they may face more challenges in physical shops, but on the other hand the accessibility of mainstream shops may discourage them)

2. Charity shops

These sites are slightly less useful as competitors that it might appear at first. They were useful when considering elements like donations but in many cases the shops were targeted at supporters not beneficiaries and they carried much narrower ranges. There are however some very high quality sites where it is clear that a lot of thought, time and effort has been invested.

3. Alternative format bookstores

This included mass market audiobook stores and some that are targetted particularly at people with sight loss. Most of these sites were dated and a little awkward to use. I reviewed them briefly but mostly didn’t return to them.

4. Disability/mobility stores

There are quite a number of these sites. They often feel like print catalogue slung on a website and weren’t very sophisticated from an IA perspective. I did look in detail at the language they used to describe products as there was likely to be a heavy overlap with our product set.

I had a number of initial questions that I wanted to research.
1. The number of categories on the homepage
2. Other elements on the homepage
3. How they handled customer login

I created a spreadsheet and when through the sites one by one, recording what I found. It took me about 2 hours to review 60 sites against this limited set of criteria.

I did the original review ages ago but I went back to the sites reasonably regularly during our design phase, usually when we couldn’t reach agreement and we needed more evidence to help make a decision. Sometimes I would just add a column to an existing spreadsheet e.g. when checking which sites had a separate business login. At other times I created whole new spreadsheets e.g. when auditing how the search function worked.

These later reviews took less time, either because I was checking for less criteria or because I dropped less relevant or low quality sites. I’m still going back to the competitive review even during testing, as various testers start finding their own favourite website and asking “why doesn’t it work like this?”.  It is always useful to know if they are right that “normal” websites do X. The competitive review  saves a lot of argument time.

I’m not a screenreader expert and if you are wondering how your site works in screenreaders it is worth getting it tested properly by experts. But if you just want to get a flavour of what it is like to use a screenreader or how screenreaders cope with particular types of content…then these tools might be helpful.

Fangs Screen Reader Emulator :: Add-ons for Firefox. This Firefox add-on will produce a (text) version of your page to give you an idea of how a screenreader might read it. It’s just an idea as it depends on the screenreader and it doesn’t help you understand how the page might sound.

If you want to experience the actual audio experience:

NVDA is a free and open source screen reader for Windows. Apparently works best with Firefox. I find it useful for quickly pointing the cursor at a bit of the page and listening to how that is read out. If you want to get a real sense of the page might be navigated then you’ll need to learn some of the commands. And you’ll probably want to slow it down to start with (go to preferences > voice controls)

JAWs is a widely used screenreader but definitely not free. You can however download a free trial. As for NVDA, you’ll need to learn some commands.

All the screenreaders are easier to use if you tend to use the keyboard more than the mouse. You’ll already be in the habit of memorising all those key combinations.

It is important to remember that a screenreader’s experience of your page will vary depending on how many of the screenreader’s functions that user knows and how they have their preferences set. The setting that controls how much punctuation is read makes a big difference but there are legitimate reasons for having it set to read all punctuation (which probably makes it sound worse and harder to process).

My basic librarian-ness is always a bit shocked by finding writing in books. But this is a bit different:

At first I suspected a personally prudish but meticulous scribbler. But there’s a more obvious explanation, of course. This book was used to record a Talking Book, a structured audio book that blind and partially sighted readers use.

Talking Books are recorded in DAISY format, a XML based markup language.

“A DAISY book is a digital audio book, designed to allow you to move around the text as efficiently and flexibly as a print user. You can:

• make bookmarks
• pause books
• speed up or slow down
• read or ignore footnotes
• jump easily from chapter to chapter, heading to heading and page to page.”

Daisy 3 Structure Guidelines, for those that like this sort of thing.

I’ve started work on a project for RNIB Rushton School and Children’s Home.

Rushton provides education, residential care, and therapies  for young people with sight loss, multiple disabilities and complex health needs.

I’m capturing requirements for an information system for the school and home.

Some of the constraints (like complying with the Care Act 2000 and OFSTED inspections) are rather less negiotiable than is usual on my typical IT projects.

And for many of the staff, their daily lives do not revolve around a desk and computer.

It’s interesting stuff and I’m looking forward to getting to know more about how Rushton works (even if that does mean a lot more travel to Coventry!)

Drop-down menus aren’t inherently evil but they do seem to encourage all sorts of terrible behaviour.

HMCS CourtFinder includes a menu that is certainly the worst I’ve had to interact with this year, and probably for a quite a long time before that.

The list is incredibly long. But more damagingly it isn’t in *any* order that I can see. Nor is this a list where you or I is likely to be sure exactly what the term we’re looking for is. After all types of court work isn’t a classification that most of us know off-by-heart.

CHOW has a nice example of topical navigation.

It’s cold, people are trying to eat healthily, and it is Superbowl time (for the Americans anyway). So the navigation includes nachos, snacks, braises and healthy recipes.

I’m very fond of this kind of navigation. For big sites it is rare than the navigation actually contains exactly what the user is looking for, instead it provides a starting point for a journey. But for any site where interest in content is influenced by outside events then you can use this knowledge to get the users where they are going much, much faster and with greater confidence.

After some of the frustations with the accessibility of the iPhone when first launched,  I wondered what people were saying about the accessibility of the iPad.  There’s not masses of commentary yet and doesn’t seem to be any from anyone with any first hand experience (unsurprisingly).

This didn’t stop abledbody being unimpressed with the accessibility of the announcement:

“In Apple’s rush to debut the new iPad tablet it forgot one little piece of marketing: Accessibility. Apple has an accessibility page but it didn’t bother to add the iPad before launching it yesterday at its headquarters. And even though Steve Jobs’ keynote was likely prepared, Apple didn’t bother to add captions for deaf or hard of hearing reporters, nor did it add captions to the 46-minute video broadcast of Jobs’ speech or the video “demo” of the new tablet.”

But they do go on to say that the iPad has the same accessibility features as the iPhone including VoiceOver, screen zoom, mono audio and closed-captioned support.  They believe the size and weight are a good thing, as are the built in speakers.

Not so good is the shortage of captioned content to actually watch, and the inability to plug in alternative input devices.

abledbody: news, insights and reviews on disability and assistive technology » Hey Apple, What About iPad’s Accessibility?.

AccessTech News is pleased with the external keyboard, white-on-black display and the  cognitive simplicity but mentions that less languages are supported for VoiceOver.

Accessibility and the iPad: First Impressions « AccessTech News.

Mac-cessibility Network comments that “iWork for the Mac is almost entirely accessible, and Apple has made it a point to have good access to its AppStore offerings. We expect iWork for the iPad to be accessible, but this is not confirmed.”

They also have content concerns:

“To date, electronic book stores, such as Amazon’s Kindle store, have not provided books in an accessible format, owing to DRM restrictions. We hope Apple may be able to pave the way for the visually impaired and their access to content with the iBooks application and store. If VoiceOver does indeed have access to the content in these publications, it would be a tremendous step forward for access to printed media.”

The Mac-cessibility Network – News [Lioncourt.com]

So I’ve finally finished my OU Contemporary Science certificate. I’ve been doing this for years, signing up for modules whenever I felt my brain atrophy.

You can study all sorts of short modules but my selections had a distinct but unplanned biological and historical science slant:

• Fossils
• Life in the Oceans
• Mammals
• Archaeology
• Darwin and Evolution
• Forensic Science

I’m taking a break for now, at least until I can’t remember that essay deadline feeling.

Right then. Back to the blog.

Since we spoke last,  I have:

Given up my FUMSI editor job. Finished off my Open Uni Certificate in Contemporary Science. Passed the Requirements Engineering exam. Got an allotment and an extra chicken. Made croissants.

I’m particularly pleased with the croissants.

I was digging around in my files this weekend and found this table I made once of different approaches to applying metadata to content. At first glance the volunteers example looks like it is only relevant to charities but alot of scenarios that refer to users tagging, it is actually volunteers tagging. The difference is doing something for your own benefit (users) or contributing something to a greater cause (volunteers).