Focus group report and findings
The combating eDiscrimination project website was not originally intended to become a central element in the research process. Rather, it was originally planned as a research output, IE an exemplar of good accessible web design. However, due to the difficulties encountered making the site accessible for the HAL screen reader, the development of the project website became more regarded as a matter of process. The choice of the HAL screen reader was a practical decision, as one researcher was dependent on this access equipment to use computers.
A focus group with eleven disabled user testers was held at the RNIB centre Liverpool. The purpose was to provide initial information over the barriers faced by individuals when accessing the internet and in particular difficulties in access to job related websites. All of the people attending the focus group had some access issues although all had a visual impairment and used assistive equipment to access internet resources.
The focus group was structured around four main themes: the access to assistive computer equipment, their experiences in Internet use, the training they have received, and the problems they have encountered when they tried accessing employment services over the Internet. With respect to the final theme, we had asked the user testers in advance to access two employment websites and to try to fill in an online application. The websites were www.monster.com and www.northwestjobs.co.uk. These were the same sites as individual user testers were required to access and provide feedback to the project. These sites are also used by the project website for any online user testers who wished to join the project.
Background
Most of the participants were either out of work, in some form of education and training, or employed on a part-time basis. All had applied for jobs previously with all having used computers and the Internet before. However, only one has applied for jobs online. The participants were generally over 30 and less than 60 years old. Almost all of the people attending used a combined text magnification and screen reader software, ‘Supernova’.
Access to Assistive Equipment and Training
Several participants noted the costs of buying assistive technology were prohibitive.
"It costs about £800 to purchase Supernova." (Participant 2)
"That’s true. It’s really expensive the equipment. So even before you start to find yourself a job, whatever it is, you’ve got to first find a way of getting assistive technology." (Participant 3)
"You also need a decent computer to start with, or otherwise it is crashing all the time. So you are talking about another 500 to 600 quid for a decent computer to run Supernova." (Participant 7)
All expressed the opinion that the initial barrier to computer access was the initial start up costs. For most, costs were met either through family finances, charitable donations, or government’s access to work scheme. However, each option has its own related problems as participants observed:
"I can’t afford the equipment so I use the library one. They only allow you an hour at a time if you book it and it takes them about 15 minutes to get the programme running which comes out of your hour." (Participant 1)
"I applied to Henshaw’s; they gave me part of the cost but only if I could find the rest myself. It took me nearly 2 years to get it." (Participant 10)
"Access to work will only come in after you start work and have an assessment. I waited 3 months for the assessment and then they were haggling with work over who should pay what. I waited nearly 18 months before I got my equipment." (Participant 11)
Hence there appears no obvious mechanisms which can be readily access to enable many disabled people to even have the equipment necessary to access the web. A secondary related barrier appeared as participants generally agreed that the levels of access to training varied considerably often dependant on the area in which people live.
"… I have got a feeling that it might be a postcode lottery. If I lived half a mile down the road, I would have free IT training, I would have a computer". (Participant 8)
"If you are in Liverpool it’s great. Liverpool council have really, really good support at the moment. I live in Prescott and they are absolutely rubbish. It is where you live". (Participant 10)
"It is a postcode lottery. It does depend on where you live actually". (Participant 3)
The issue of training with assistive equipment was regarded as almost essential, because not only did it prepare disabled people for work, it also provided confidence for individuals to apply for posts in the first instance.
"I would feel so much more confident if I knew I could start a job and be able to use the equipment when I started. The thought of going in on the first day without knowing anything about how to use the computer fills me with dread." (Participant 6)
"How many employers will take you on then wait for access to work to buy the equipment, and then wait till you can use it properly?" (Participant 8)
"I want to sit in the interview and say ‘yes I can use IT, yes I can access the Internet’. Not sit there and say ‘yes there is training available, yes there is Access to Work, yes it will be available to use some time in the future’, which I can’t determine and they can’t determine either." (Participant2 )
The issue raised above is particularly relevant to small employers. Whilst large organisations including government agencies may be in a position to wait for both equipment and training to be provided for disabled employees, it would be difficult to imagine the same situation would be possible for smaller employers with much tighter budgetary and cash flow conditions. Employers are in the first instance required to purchase any equipment for disabled staff under the access to work initiative, and then reclaim the money spent from the programme. So, as discussed above, with equipment often taking several months to arrive, and employers then having to wait several months for reimbursement of costs, then it could be the case that small employers would be reluctant to engage disabled workers who required expensive computer equipment. Clearly if the problems of training are then added to the situation, it would be understandable from an economic or business argument to disregard disabled job seekers purely from the financial implications. Under such an analysis it would be difficult to argue a ‘business case’ for the employment of such disabled people, with any rationality for their engagement resting more towards arguments of social justice. Perhaps this is why the inclusion of disabled people is often regarded as best met outside arguments of business rationality, rather falling on public sector and voluntary organisations.
Access to assistive equipment in public facilities
As discussed earlier, some public facilities including libraries do have a range of assistive equipment available free for use by disabled people. However, worthy as such initiatives are, participants told of limitations and problems when such facilities were used. This issue revolves principally around independence of use. When screen readers or text magnification systems are used on privately owned computers, the assistive software is designed to load by default with the operating systems. From this position the disabled user can use the assistive equipment set to personal requirements by default to select programmes and any other feature of the computer. However, it appears this start up process is regularly disabled by library specialists thereby removing independence of access. The consequence of this is that although disabled people can book up to one hour on a library computer, in reality this time is significantly reduced as library staff are required to enter user name and passwords, select and load assistive programmes every time the disabled users attempt to use library computers.
"In London, I know they have Supernova. You can have it for an hour. So I can use it. But it is limited in the amount of time. Also the passwords for the PCs, the login part you have to go through a series of inaccessible edit boxes... They have to spend 15 to 20 minutes before Supernova is loaded. That is part of the hour." (Participant 5)
Hence, although theoretically accessible computers are available free to use in libraries, in practice when the time constraints are taken into account, and additional time is added for disabled users to try and search for jobs, putting to one side the often inaccessible design of employment websites, then library provision could not offer access to many disabled users. Again the only practical method of accessing websites would be via home computers which again is restricted to cost and training issues mentioned earlier. With the problems of accessing equipment discussed, the group moved on to issues of the accessibility of websites generally,.
Using Internet resources
Many websites have accessibility options on their homepage, which allows the users to change some settings or to activate a simple online screen reader. The problem described by one user tester was that often the accessibility options are often virtually hidden on the homepage in small print in some remote corner.
"I did a lot of testing of the accessibility options. Often they are right at the bottom of the page in small print. So you can’t actually see where they are very easily, unless you know where they are." (Participant 8)
"I have been going to Remploy helping me with jobs. This happened with Merseyside Police. You have actually got to look because if there are any jobs advertised on the site there, you know its mute it’s a big thing to download off the Internet... It’s people who are dyslexic saying it is too small. I said I am sorry, I am not even bothering with that." (Participant 4)
Even when and if accessibility options can be located, this does not in itself solve many of the issues disabled computer users face. Most participants had very similar problems when it came to colour options provided by websites, and the problems of website default colours disabling accessible options available to the disabled users from their assistive equipment.
"Black and white (as default colours) is best you know. So that you can base your colour background on quite a bit of colour data. If you have all these screen colours you can’t see anything." (Participant 3)
"You might have very pale orange and I work on black sometimes. That is orange on black background. Or yellow on black would be fine. If they decide to put purples and writing in the pale colour, sometimes it doesn’t come through... and they have got yellow text in.. and you have some of your colours as green. We need to be able to customise it to whatever is our preferred colour scheme." (Participant 2)
"It depends on web page colours, when you reverse the colour with Supernova they contrast on each other it doesn’t matter how you change it; the poor contrast is still there." (Participant 4).
"We are all individuals, we all have our own preferences, we want to keep the contrast, it is your colours and you can customise them. We can do it for ourselves." (Participant 7)
"And it looks so pretty with these gorgeous colours, with that beautiful jade or a dark jade. Or it was very dark jade with black. And I just switched it off because I thought it is just not worth going any further." (Participant 9)
How documents were made available from websites also raised considerable concern. Where standard ‘Word’ documents appeared to present few barriers, because they could be accessed using an individuals own default colour options, by contrast, PDF documents were generally regarded as problematic.
"The only problem I am having is that it is in PDF and the screen doesn’t work with one of those." (Participant 1)
The issue of accessing PDF documents did exercise the group, below relates the tone of the discussion.
"PDF comes in a different format, it’s very strange." (Participant 6)
"I no. It’s far worse." (Participant 3)
"PDF is horrible. A lot of files are in PDF. It is just horrible to use." (Participant 10)
"Especially the colour contrast of it, of PDF. These people, these web designers, ‘oh it’s a wonderful page, isn’t it pretty?’ There is no colour contrast or no colours to use. It just makes it worse." (Participant 2)
The issue of font size and colour accessibility together with more general issues of accessing particularly web 2.0 sites where often security codes are captured inside discreet and highly inaccessible boxes also overlapped in to discussions of how accessible the two employment related job sites were.
"There is a new feature on web pages, also on job web pages these days. On the Login, when you sign up, you have strange colours and letters with different shapes. It is a new thing…with really strange colours in the background and letters in it. You have to identify and copy them to sign in. You can’t see a thing. It is actually horrible. It doesn’t matter what you use, you can’t change the colours." (Participant 3)
"If you sign in there is a grey box with six letters in, but there is a mixture of strange colours behind these letters." (Participant 1)
"Sometimes there are strange fonts and I don’t know why they make it so hard to read. But you are meant to copy them into a box beneath to verify that you are whatever. It is really hard to read because it is very strange colours." (Participant 6)
"At least you can see and know the letters are there, using only a screen reader is different, for some reason they make those boxes so that screen readers can’t even go inside to read the numbers." (Participant 11).
These extracts highlight the added problem facing many disabled people as web 2.0 technology moves increasingly into websites. Exclusion for the web can only increase if many disabled users are prevented from signing in to sites because the capture graphics demanded as a security check cannot be accessed. However, neither employment related sites we asked focus group members to access before coming to the group had such sign in barriers, hence this particular barrier did not prevent access. Although, other access issues did disable most group members.
"A difficult point about the Internet is that with the zoom-text technology I use is that the busier a page; the more difficult it is to read. If you can’t fit everything on the screen then you are hopping here and hopping there…it becomes so difficult that you give up in the end. Like one of those websites you gave us. There was so many bits here and bits there I can’t read it all at once so I have to keep reading it. So the busier…these web pages might be, they may be very pretty and professional, but they sometimes put too much stuff on it." (Participant 2)
"Monster.com was in columns. So I was going down one column. I sometimes I was out of a column I can see to get an idea of the layout by putting a whole page on. Otherwise when I put it back on to read it, that Monster one, I read one column and then I went down another column. It was good the way it was laid out, while the Northwest one was absolutely awful. The size and colour was absolutely everywhere I found." (Participant 9)
"Yes I did try to find a job. I clicked upon any other job basically trying to follow through. I did find it difficult and then I kept thinking I don’t know what I was doing. In the end I kind of gave up." (Participant 1)
"It had all these things down the side something like baskets; I found it really frustrating actually. Did anybody find when you put something in the basket, and then you couldn’t find what it is in your basket. It was very small on the top and it says ‘when you find the job you want, put it in the basket’." (Participant 7)
"Monster, I could access the information, the job specs etc., but then I could not work out how to apply to any of them. I could access the other one because of the colours. I gave up on the other one." (Participant 5)
Focus group members whilst able to access the specified websites to varying degrees found the process extremely time consuming and often induced eye strain. No individual found either website easy or quick to use. However, an issue additionally brought up was the frequently observed problem of filling in forms whether online or from downloaded applications. Those who expressed an opinion were mostly concerned with the impression a badly laid out form would produce for any prospective employer. This appeared to be the position even when the design of the form was poorly structured and mostly inaccessible.
"They don’t let you type it in; you have got to write it by hand. You print the form out and then write it by hand and sometimes they have little boxes where you have to put it in. Each letter in an individual box and it is just a nightmare." (Participant 2)
"With an online application form, for example the university one, I make sure that everything is aligned and when you have columns and tables with data, it might not fit in with the descriptions of your qualifications presentation-wise. When you are submitting your application form, you have to ask people to make sure that the presentation of the content is all aligned properly." (Participant 5)
"If you go over the box, the little box, they will just void it in your application." (Participant 4)
"It would be far easier to go on the website to actually fill it in. You put it in the box and fill it in on the website. Would be far easier if the boxes expanded to suit your application." (Participant 8) .
"In the application there is another place where you go normally to write details in sort of pay etc and often the background is in strange colours. It can sometimes have the palest orange words on it and white space where you have to write, they are horrible." (Participant 3)
Conclusions
The focus group provided some very useful questions for the research to address. Although participants had a variety and range of different impairments they all used a combination of screen reader and text magnification, or were single users of text magnification. Here the generic term ‘text magnification’ is used although readers should be aware such software also provides users the ability to choose and alter colours and there contrast settings. However, for the majority the ability of assistive equipment to gain access to internet resources was restricted due to the conflicts which occur as default colours selected by web developer’s contrast or conflict with user preference settings.
One issue which many found disabling was the methods of producing inaccessible PDF formats without accessible ‘Word’ alternatives. Similarly, application form design requires considerable thought if it is not to discriminate against many disabled users. Online application forms would be significantly more accessible if text boxes were expandable to allow information to be simply copied and pasted in from word processed documents. Multiple constructed tables with numerous columns and rows many of which contain no descriptive element for screen reader users are particularly inaccessible. Perhaps one practical observation here would be to allow disabled computer users to evaluate application forms for accessibility before organisations upload them on to employment and job vacancy pages.
Focus group members provided many simple alternatives to overcome the multiplicity of barriers found on the Internet. Perhaps the simplest was for web developers to produce sites which can detect visitors are using assistive equipment and ensure this is not overridden by site default colours. All focus group members were frequent users of Internet sites and the most frequent reason for abandoning any specific site was because of poor or inappropriate design. After all, what is the point of providing accessibility features on a website in a location that cannot be found by a disabled computer user? Many of the issued raised in this chapter could be regarded as issues of common sense and good design if internet applications are to be designed for the majority of disabled people. However, as web 2.0 technologies gain greater presence on the web, it will be the duty of developers to ensure security codes which require first reading and then copying in to signing up routines are at an absolute minimum made available in a format which can be accessed by users of text magnification and screen readers.