Prior to the summer of 2009, I began considering internship opportunities for anthropology majors. With an express interest in cognitive science and the role of technology in society, I began to look at usability research and the work of anthropologists within the field. Usability engineers examine products and systems with end-users to ensure task efficiency and to improve the productivity, ease-of-use, and satisfaction in an iterative testing and development environment. Web usability focuses on making websites simple, intuitive, and robust while user centered design involves development that focuses on the needs of the end-user. After doing extensive individual research and speaking with my internship advisor, I decided to apply at Knowbility, inc. as an intern.
Knowbility is a non-profit 501(c)3 based out of Austin, Texas that advocates for web accessibility. Its mission is to “support the independence of children and adults with disabilities by promoting the use and improving the availability of accessible information technology. Our goal is to create a barrier-free world of information technology so children, youth, and adults with disabilities can fully participate in the information marketplace.” Knowbility accomplishes its goal through a variety of programs geared toward research, training, and IT consulting services. Accessibility Internet Rally (AIR) was the program that initially constituted Knowbility’s formation. Steve Geungrich, with the help of accessibility experts such as John Slatin, started AIR in 1999 as an annual contest held in Austin that paired web developers and programmers with non-profit organizations, state agencies, and corporations. AIR helps these businesses make their websites accessible to the disabled while improving the quality of their on-line content.
Web accessibility empowers the lives of those with disabilities by granting access to technological resources and accessibility remediation is the process by which IT experts, web developers, and programmers convert electronic information resources into an accessible format for users of assistive technologies (AT). The expansiveness of the internet and improved assistive technologies have been empowering advances for persons with a wide range of disabilities. Screen readers, refreshable Braille displays, and video captioning are just a few examples of AT that have dramatically increased access to vital information and resources for the disabled community.
Since Knowbility’s inception, several other programs have been introduced including Assistive Technology, Strategies, Tools, Accommodations, and Resources (ATSTAR) and AccessWorks. ATSTAR provides web-based assistive technology training models designed to prepare instructional staff at the campus level to conduct assessments, collect data, and integrate assistive technology into the instructional setting. AccessWorks provides consulting and remediation services and employs many Texans with disabilities, giving them technology skills and experience to establish good careers and achieve independence.
My interest in Knowbility was fostered by the increasing technological divide I noticed while working in the IT community. As a previous electronics technician in the military and as a tech support agent for an internet service provider, I was exposed to calls from all across the nation concerning internet access, email, and website issues from a wide range of people of diverse backgrounds. One thing I consistently noticed was that feedback from customers actually using our services was inefficiently incorporated into new developments within the organization. I would receive calls each day with customer recommendations, concerns, and complaints for our IT services and website. When I would express these concerns to my employer or offer solutions derived from customer feedback, I was met with resistance, and often little to nothing was changed. This “digital divide” between the purveyors of technology and the general populous became a growing point of concern. As an anthropology major, I was interested in the process by which consumer feedback was integrated into company policy and used in design anthropology. Through my anthropological coursework and independent research I was introduced to design anthropologists such as Najko Jahn and Christina Wasson who employ ethnographic methods in their usability studies. Their research also involved accessibility for people with disabilities and held the philosophy that designing for the extremes in human variation is beneficial to all. Knowbility gave me an opportunity to explore the application of these concepts in the workplace.
At Knowbility, the first thing I noticed about our organizational structure was that it wasn’t hierarchical in the traditional sense. Our staff members, while mediated by the executive director Sharron Rush, hold positions on more of an ad-hoc basis. Everyone “wears many hats” and policy is shaped by the organization as a whole with input from each member’s respective specialties; final approval is given by our executive director. This organizational construct, while more loosely defined, allowed for policy changes and considerations to be taken into account without excess bureaucracy. I was able to affect policy shaping in a more independent fashion than most of my previous employment experiences and have been working with our business development manager to increase our organizational efficiency and standardize our remediation and testing methods.
As a research intern, I was in charge of developing new projects that would benefit both the company and my individual needs as an anthropology intern. This task was much more difficult than I could have imagined, but I learned much in the process. Over the course of several months working part-time for Knowbility I came up with several ideas for usability research projects, including an accessibility survey and user experience testing and modeling. Some of my ideas never fully panned out, due to limited funding, time, and resources, but by setting my sights high I was able to overcome limitations and won the respect of my colleagues. My persistence to make a valuable contribution to web accessibility was commended, and I was able to affect internal policies that will shape the future of Knowbility. Working from the fundamentals up, I learned about the wide array of techniques used in web accessibility.
As I grew more familiar with the basics, document remediation work became my primary responsibility. Document remediation primarily consists of organizing the structure and layout of MS Word, PowerPoint, and PDF documents in order to enable accessibility by various assistive technologies to disabled end-users. For instance, images that contain information vital to a document’s content must be transcribed using alternate text fields to denote the information contained within. Audio files must include text alternatives, video requires captioning, and the layout and flow of a document must be setup so that people with visual impairments, colorblindness, hearing impairment, mobility impairment, or any of a wide range of disabilities can access the information. Screen reader programs such as Jaws® from Freedom Scientific allow written text to be read out loud to users with visual impairment. Independent keyboard access is a requirement for the mobility impaired and those who use single-switch or sip and puff devices to navigate a document. Characters that are not recognized by screen readers must be substituted, and color contrast must be sufficient for red-green colorblind deficiencies such as my own. All the aspects of document remediation also enable the average user to access the same information in a variety of formats, increasing the productivity of the information contained within. Section 508 and WCAG standards for web accessibility provide guidelines for making content accessible and robust, but most of the work is done by trial and error and independent quality assurance with usability testing by disabled users (Section 508 adherence is a guideline for all federal agencies that produce or disseminate electronic resources to provide comparable access to persons with disabilities while WCAG standards are internationally recognized accessibility guidelines that are not enforced by federal law).
Among my many hats as a Knowbility intern, I have also re-written policy documents concerning best practices for PDF remediations, and was privileged to write the Usability Test Plan for a potential client. This document helped win us a sizable contract that may include future in-depth usability studies as part of an overall accessibility policy for our client. As an advocate for accessibility, I have also attended numerous Austin tech-lunch events and been given speaking privileges to advocate for web accessibility.
A particular event that was a first-rate learning experience was my work with a Usability Engineer on a cognitive walk-through for a local banking company. Cognitive walk-throughs are generally conducted in the initial analysis of a design prototype and can provide beneficial insight into the progress of basic web development. They can be conducted with usability and accessibility experts alone or, ideally, with the focus group. While they are considered “discount usability” techniques they should be part of an iterative development process. Aside from the Non-Disclosure Agreement signed as a precursor to participation in this project, I can say that the methods we used were similar to interview techniques used in ethnography.
Other experiences at Knowbility have been fruitful as well. When I arrived at Knowbility, our Access Works program was in the process of being revamped. My initial internship mentor wanted to include disabled veterans in the program. Together, we contacted numerous veterans’ advocate groups including Disabled American Veterans (DAV), Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA), The Wounded Warrior Project, and VA hospitals within the Austin-San Antonio corridor to recruit participants. Collectively, we were able to recruit 8 people with disabilities, 6 document remediation specialists (including 2 veterans) and 2 blind Quality Assurance specialists (user-experience testers). Together with our project manager, we trained these new participants, developing a team of remediation experts to ensure the accessibility of hundreds of government documents so far.
After several months of training and development of our Access Works program, our contract consulting agency had us submit a new proposal for a potential client. The proposal included a Usability Test Plan which I wrote based on my previous research in User Centered Design. The test plan included provisions for the inclusion of persons with various disabilities, summative and formative evaluations, and internal policy development within an iterative testing framework. My background in anthropology helped me formulate a workable plan that included heuristics, anthropological screening techniques, and context relevant factors to guide the testing phases and analysis of a prototype. Understanding anthropological design methodology helped me convince the prospective client of our ability to conduct effective analysis of qualitative and quantitative data trends and come up with solutions to fit their needs. While I haven’t been able to employ all of these methods yet, my formulation of the requirements helped us win the contract. If they decide to include usability testing in any of their future development projects, we will undoubtedly be well prepared to accommodate them.
Anthropology?
Anthropologists conduct ethnographic research in order to understand how society works from both a micro and macrocosmic perspective; i.e. as a self-interested individual working within a cultural system and as a member of the whole of a given social context. Conducting ethnographic research allows the anthropologist to get at the deeper meaning in social interactions through scientific inquiry, and make qualitative judgments based on the analysis. Anthropologists routinely do geographic and historic research; collate databases of demographic information; and use random sampling, participant observation, and interview techniques to develop and test hypotheses about socio-cultural phenomena. Further, anthropologists use this data to create explanatory theories.
Perhaps the most important quality an anthropologist brings to the table, however, is his/her ability to constantly re-evaluate his/her contextual environment and adapt to or implement change. Anthropologists study humanity because it intrigues them, partly because of the subjective identification of themselves within their subjects and wholly for the pursuit of empirical knowledge. Anthropologists’ holistic outlook on the world enables them to understand that their preconceptions can be hindrances in an ever changing world.
Anthropologists understand that their knowledge is changing and they must create better, more accurate models of the world around them to be able to explain why biology, society, language, or cultures behave the way they do. As Rice and O’Brian state in the article, “Using Science to Think Anthropologically”:
If truth and proof are finite and non-changing, knowledge is changeable and fluid. Today’s knowledge is yesterday’s antiquated myth, and tomorrow’s knowledge will show that half of what we think is wrong. Scientists look for change in knowledge, and it is healthy to be skeptical about one’s own work as well as others.
This constant pursuit of understanding is what drives anthropologists and the work they do, and in a manner directly relevant to usability design.
References:
- Brewer, Judy. “Web Accessibility Highlights and Trends.” ACM SIGCAPH Computers and the Physically Handicapped 76 (2003): 15-16. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1036401.1036408 (accessed Apr 26, 2009).
- Faiola, Anthony and Karl MacDorman. “The Influence of Holistic and Analytic Cognitive Styles on Online Information Design: Toward a Communication theory of cultural cognitivedesign.” Information, Communication, and Society 11, no. 3 (2008): 348-374.
- Jahn, Najko. “Anthropological Motivated Usability Evaluation: An exploration of IREON – international relations and area studies gateway.” Library Hi Tech 26, no. 4 (2008): 606-621.
- De Marisco, Maria. “A Proposal Toward The Development of Accessible E-learning Content by
- Human InvolvementUniversal Access in the Information Society 5. 2 (2006), 150-169, http://www.springerlink.com/content/w8176092qr655955/fulltext.pdf. (accessed May 2, 2009).
- O’Brian,Robin. Thinking Anthroplogically: A Practical Guide for Students. 2nd ed. Using
- Science to Think Anthroplogically. Phillip C. Salzman and Patricia C. Rice. UpperSaddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2008.
- Wasson, Christina. “Ethnography in the Field of Design.” Human Organization 59, no. 4 (2000): 377-388.