[Sigia-l] 508 Compliance - Alt Tags for Button Images

[Whitney Quesenbery]

At 07:11 PM 10/2/2003 -0400, Tanya Rabourn wrote:

Can you point us to any published user studies that go over such
things? All I seem to come across are articles that suggest best
practices based on the capability of screenreaders like JAWS,
rarely do I find studies of how users actually use JAWS. Any
studies that you could point to involving observation of actual
user behavior among groups that benefit from sites that are built
to be "accessible" would be appreciated.

My reply:

You might be interested in this short article, and any subsequent 
publications from the folks at NCI and Ginny Redish. Rather than see 
whether people using screen readers could use a specific site, they looked 
at how those people experiences the web


Observing Users Who Listen to Web Sites
by Janice (Ginny) Redish and Mary Frances Theofanos

The Communications Technology Branch at the United States National Cancer 
Institute (part of the National Institutes of Health and the Department of 
Health and Human Services) has been conducting usability testing with blind 
and low-vision users to:
·	Understand how blind and low-vision users work with web sites.
·	See the relationship between accessibility and usability.
·	Assess the usability of specific web sites for blind and low-vision users.
In this article we focus on the first of these goals and give you some of 
the fascinating findings about how vision-impaired users work with web sites.

http://www.stcsig.org/usability/newsletter/0304-observing.html

Whitney Quesenbery
Whitney Interactive Design, LLC
w. www.WQusability.com
e. whitneyq at wqusability.com
p. 908-638-5467

UPA  - www.usabilityprofessionals.org
STC Usability SIG: www.stcsig.org/usability