Here’s your chance to help define what is meant by an accessible web experience!
We’re interested in finding out more about how some common user interface design patterns can be made as useful as possible to use by people with disabilities, through The CSUN 2016 UXathon, at this year’s CSUN conference in San Diego.We’re very grateful to the CSUN conference organising team for their support in enabling this event to happen.
The UXathon will take place through two activities:
- An online Design Pattern Usability Study, which will provide information for
- A hackday, exploring solutions
The results will be contributed to the W3C Accessible Rich Internet Applications Working Group to help improve WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices. You’ll be helping to improve the user experience for anyone using a site that makes use of these design patterns.
Stage 1: Design Pattern Usability Study
We’re looking for people who use a range of assistive technologies and input devices, such as keyboards and voice input, to take part in a study evaluating some examples of different types of interactive web content. Each example is designed with accessibility in mind, but takes a different approach to the same problem.
The study involves taking an online survey, which will ask you questions about your assistive technology use, and then invite you to use some user interface component examples, and report on your experience of using these examples.
Design Pattern Usability Survey
Follow-up evaluation
We’ll invite people who took part in the online survey to test the same examples as featured in the study, but this time in person, so that we can ask follow-up questions and invite participants to express their opinions in more detail.
With participants’ permission, we will record these sessions, allowing designers and developers more insight, as they will also be able to see and hear how people interact with each example.
If you’ll be at CSUN and would like to take part in this stage of the UXathon, we strongly encourage you to complete the online survey first.
Stage 2: Hacking Solutions
For the second stage of the UXathon, we are looking for developers and designers to join us the morning of Saturday, March 26 from 9:00 – 12:00 in the Pier room of the Manchester Grand Hyatt, on the 3rd floor next to the Promenade foyer.
The purpose of this stage will be to take the feedback we’ve gathered from the online study and follow-up evaluations, and hack solutions to enhance the design patterns further. The results will be shared widely, and will be available for comment by those who cannot attend the CSUN Conference.
Are you interested?
If you’d like to take part, you can go directly to the online survey, or contact us directly by emailing csunuxathon@gmail.com with the subject CSUN UXathon. Let us know in which stage you would like to participate (you can participate in both if you like!), so we can send you the right information.
We expect lots of interest in the first CSUN UXathon and can’t guarantee space for everyone who signs up. We thank you in advance for your understanding.
The Deque aXe Hackathon
You may also be interested in another exciting event taking place on the final Saturday of CSUN. Our colleagues at Deque are organising an aXe accessibility hackathon, exploring solutions using their aXe technology. For more information, see the Deque web site.
