Just wondering who here utilises focus groups for accessibility testing? How did you go about finding such a group? Do you use the same group for each relevant project? Logistically, how do you organise these sessions? What have your experiences been? Do you have any advice for those of us seeking manual verification?
Be as brief or as detailed as you wish — it's all good!
Great first question for the Accessibility category ;)
OK this is a brief answer, hope it helps...
Focus groups are really best for a limited range of testing - Usually when you're gathering requirements for a site or would like to hold a general discussion. Or if you're wanting a group to brainstorm ideas, for example.
When you need to look at things in detail, one-to-one sessions are far more useful. So with regard to accessibility testing, one to one is generally better as it allows you to engage more with each user, hold in-depth discussions, or observe one person at a time. Clearly it's more labour intensive and you need to allocate more time.
To identify suitable participants, first you need to think about the aspect of the site accessibility are you attempting to research and then define the user profile . There are various community organisations that work with people with disabilities, which you could contact. Not sure about Adelaide though.
If you can vary participants, I think it's good to do that as much as possible, so that the participants don't get used to the process and perhaps guess what you're asking them to test. Then again, it might be difficult to find a large number of participants who are available... there's a whole lot of considerations here.
*Very* briefly, to organise the session: Understand what your client wants you to test Recruit participants Review the site yourself and create some tasks to use in testing the site Run the sessions one -to-one Don't forget to pay the participants!
My experience is that user testing is always beneficial, and gives you more than a standard review (without users) ever will.
Good luck and let us know how you go! That will help others too ;)
The only focus groups I've had to deal with are regional access.. which is an accessibility issue in and of itself (14.4k is still problematic around some areas of Australia, it seems).
Participants in this respect were quite easy to come by, as we have more than a few committees dedicated to regional and remote issues.
Feedback and issues were allocated and scoped for new usability and accessibility initiatives. Payment and other incentives were offered for their time and effort to ascertain how the sites responded on their remote connections.
@ Adam Ok my understanding when you said 'accessibility' was that you were thinking about users with disabilities... is that correct?
@Lawrence Yes that's a relevant point. While you're not talking specifically about users with disabilities, low bandwidth or slow connections is definitely a consideration in creating accessible sites, especially in regional areas. Creating accessible sites, by our typical definition, should help to provide regional users with better access to information.
On Accessibility in Australians living in rural areas, you might find this paper interesting (it's a pdf).
Web Sites for Rural Australia Designing for Accessibility A report for the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation by Jim Groves February 2000
I'm Arielle and I'm new to the group. I come from the Philippines and I'm a member of our local accessibility group called, PWAG (pwag.org).
As a response to Adam's first post: our group is pretty much a focus group having members from the visually impaired and the deaf/mute sectors. And it is a good thing for me (and for other designers as well) that the group had already been formed before I joined.
PWAG evaluations are done online. We have a mailing list in Yahoo! where a member can point to a website and ask for evaluation from other members. Our blind members are the most active and give the most practical critique, but the problem I feel is that they are almost-exclusively JAWs users. There are some of use who experiment with other screen reading applications though.
Experiences? Being able to discuss accessibility matters with people who really need them is very enlightening. Although there are times that it becomes frustrating because one finds out that there are cases wherein a screen reading application will not correctly render a standard HTML element like a DL because the application doesn't know how-- as I found out recently.