The methodological approach taken places disabled users in the role of research designers, testers, evaluators, and finally analysers. The prime reason for this somewhat unconventional approach is based on the fact that because of the multitude of methods of accessing the web, both in terms of adaptive equipment and more standard methods used by a wide variety of people with varying types and severity of impairments, then the level of experiential knowledge held could only be expressed by placing such users at the central core of research activity. One example of how this involvement affected the initial research design can be observed in the way the formulation of what constitutes disability inside ICTs’ has been adopted by the research team. Many traditional methods of assigning group membership towards disabled people are achieved by considering classifications based on impairment definitions. In both the UK and USA, this practice is demonstrated in their relative pieces of anti discrimination legislation: the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA-UK) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA-USA) respectively. Similarly and unsurprisingly perhaps, the International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and Handicap, by the World Health Organisation adopts the same traditional understandings. This in turn raises the question of why, and what difference to ICT research is achieved by adopting alternative methodological approaches?
The most fundamental and wide ranging aspect is to be found by considering how disabled research stakeholders determined the site of disability. This is a critical factor in research, afterall if the site of disability is a place of contention, then methods to remove disability also become problematic. Again, traditional understandings often regard disability as a functional aspect of impairment; ergo an impaired person is disabled. This research has rejected this simplistic schemer. Instead, disability is not related to impairment, rather disability is defined in terms of the way ICT designers construct systems which prevent universal access for all computer users. In other words, the research rejects any notion of ‘computer users with disabilities’. This may appear a semantic point, but one we believe is core to readdressing concepts of eDiscrimination. There are no computer users with disabilities, because the term places the disability firmly as a function of the person. Rather, disability is rooted inside inaccessible ICT design. The theoretical implication of this construct moves the ‘problem’ of inaccessible design away from impaired computer users and firmly towards systems designers who create disability by not building ICTs for all by default. Another means of conceptualising the issue is to consider that the output from any computer is inaccessible without adaptive equipment. For most people, this adaptation is achieved through a visual display unit. By concentrating on this dominant access technology, design for alternative access methods including screen readers, text magnification, and non mouse use to name a few, has meant that such alternative means to gaining access have been regularly consigned to a secondary, specialist, non standard market. This returns us to the point that the linguistics of disability becomes important in understanding its construction. Because the concept of universal design has not been generally adopted in ICT circles, then the issue of disability is often regarded as specialist, outside the ‘norm’, and is resplendent with terms including ‘adaptive’ and ‘accessible’, which in reality mask the obvious point that initially design was discriminatory and not based on universal principals. Although this argument may appear academic and rooted in linguistics, our research has revealed other aspects of accessibility which may not have been considered by more traditional research methods.
One issue which often appeared and was considered as problematic for user testers was E Accessible material online. Consideration is required at the authorship level as well as in web design. For example, screen readers pronounce the phrase ‘AA’ as ‘aah’. A more accessible rendering of the term ‘AA’ would be ‘double A’. Clearly the issue of making the web accessible requires confronting on several levels. The principal focus of this research is web accessibility in relation to employment issues. Thus a significant aspect of the research is to determine the accessibility of employment related web sites.
National job-hunting portal Totaljobs.com offer a ‘text-only’ version of their otherwise completely inaccessible site, whilst the popular www.monster.co.uk job hunting website now offer http://www.access.monster.co.uk/, which is an ‘accessible’ (to Level A) version. But ‘text-only’ and Level A ‘accessible’ versions of websites are of little help to many disabled users. In the North West, neither www.northwestjobs.co.uk/ nor www.jobs-nw.co.uk seems to have made any effort at all at accessibility. www.nweo.jobsgopublic.com/ - the North Western Local Authorities Employers Organisation, claiming to be the UK's leading website for Public Sector careers, has seemingly made no effort at all at accessibility. Public sector employment as a proportion of total employment was 21 per cent in the North West region in June 2005 (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1292), which provides some indication of the degree of eDiscrimination potentially facing disabled computer users. This research will provide an audit of up to 100 employment web sites to quantify the level of compliance to web content accessibility guidelines. With the help and assistance of disabled computer users, the research will complement this technical audit with the experiential knowledge gained by users who will be asked to provide empirical evidence of accessibility on a representative sample of selected sites.
Although the concept of eDiscrimination may be a relatively new phenomenon, a brief review of history reveals that the two concepts, disability and employment are closely linked, a problematic relationship for successive governments over the past century. Such a review also reveals that our methodological approach, providing ‘distance’ and cleared definitions of the two terms, impairment, and disability, is not new and has previously been employed in the struggle to provide greater employment opportunities for disabled people.