William Yarbrough

So I recently got a chance to write an article for the LBJ Journal, a student publication dealing with policy and government. I wrote about the recent Target court settlement with the National Association of the Blind. I’ll post the article here, but please check out the journal at http://www.lbjjournal.com.

In 1990, with the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and again in 1998 with the passing of the Section 508 amendments to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Americans with disabilities won victories toward the better use of technology for all. Like curb-cuts outside office buildings or wheelchair-accessible bathrooms, the purpose of these acts was to enact laws which would (hopefully) guarantee many disabled members of society a more balanced and comfortable way to accomplish day-to-day activities that the majority of Americans take for granted.

Section 508 and the later WCAG–supplementary guidelines on accessibility from the governing group of the Internet, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)–are both instrumental in ensuring access to emerging technologies. With the importance of mobile, connective technology such as Web applications and company intranets, more and more Americans depended on technology to run their businesses and their lives. All of which mandated a certain level of Web accessibility to access information and perform tasks virtually such as email.

Most of the Web sites are currently (relatively) easy for Americans without disabilities to navigate. Visual clues, clean layouts, roll-over navigation, and streaming video are all commonplace technologies used to navigate the Web. Many of these, however, pose problems to Americans with disabilities: blind users cannot see where the navigation is on a page, deaf users cannot hear the content presented in a streaming video, users with mobility impairments cannot click on a news feed story before it scrolls away. These examples highlight the need to make the Web as accessible as possible now, while the technology is still fairly young. This is even more important as the Web becomes more and more a platform for social networking, open forums, and an online marketplace.

Last year, the corporate giant Target, was sued by the California Federation of the Blind (later the National Federation for the Blind) for discrimination. Target’s e-commerce section of their site contained discounts on products not available in brick and mortar stores. Though most sighted users could find the deals and had little to no problem, blind users could not get their deals due to poor code and perhaps a lack of understanding on the part of Target’s Web team (which happens to be run at least in part on Amazon.com technology).

Blind users use text-to-speech programs like JAWS or FireVox to navigate sites but must deal with the markup and code in a non-visual sense. Context clues such as “on the sidebar” or “at the bottom of the page” don’t mean much if the code is all spat out at once without visual clues filled in. The case ended last month with Target acknowledging that their site was not accessible enough, paying a $6 million settlement, and agreeing to restructure their entire Web platform. Target was commended for their changes and sites like Amazon.com, eBay, and Wal-Mart are working furiously to bring their sites up to par.

This settlement marks the first time that accessibility has really come into play in the private marketplace. Laws like the ADA and Section 508 are mandatory for public institutions such as schools, government bureaucracy and state program sites. However, they had been difficult to mandate for individuals. Many e-commerce and social media sites are currently hard for many Americans with disabilities to enjoy. The Web is one of the last frontiers of deregulated space and is still very young. By making accessibility a priority, developers, businesses, and governments set the groundwork for future expansion on the good examples. It makes good business sense to reach as many end users as possible to sell more products. It makes good governmental sense to reach as many of your constituents as possible. Plus it’s just a good, altruistic thing to do.

Even Google, one of the largest search engines on the planet, is “blind”– Google views content on a page in very much the same way a blind human user with a screen reader takes in information. It stands to reason then, that because everyone wants to make Google love them (and thus increase in the search rankings), accessibility is the way to go.

The late Dr. John Slatin, founding director of the Accessibility Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and a long-time contributor to the cause of accessibility, truly believed that by creating and shaping the Web to be as accessible as possible, usability would naturally follow suit. When a site is usable, information is easily conveyed to a user. This is something the creators of the Internet were always trying to accomplish better, faster, and easier.

By thinking about emerging technology in a way that will be easier–more accessible and more usable–for those who may have the most difficulty, all users will naturally benefit and the Web can unfold into a much better place for all.

In every project there is some kind of give-and-take that goes on. Every side makes sacrifices, every side wins or loses it’s little battles for the good of the project. Today I want to talk about two groups that are clashing a lot in my projects lately. Namely SEO (that’s Search Engine Optimization, or “How to be Google’s friend who gets invited to all the cool parties”) and Usability (that’s how easy and intuitive information and layout are, or “How to win friends and influence people”). For the purposes of the discussion I might put a little accessibility in on the Usability side.

SEO is concerned with metrics, robots, and page rank. The SEO expert is constantly trying to see what makes the search engine algorithms tick with tips and tricks to get your page seen, get traffic moved to the site, and make sure it stays that way. SEO isn’t easy and requires a fanatical instinct to keep track of what does and doesn’t work (as no one is really privy to how the search engines truly work) with one finger on the pulse of the news and one eye on how “black-hat” they can be. In old western films, the bad guys wore black hats, the good guys: white. Many practices in SEO can be what’s known as “gray hat” which is not quite “white hat” (read:good and above board), but makes you go, “hmmmm… I dunno”. “Black hat” SEO can get you banned from Google’s listing (the abyss from which there is no return) but “gray hat” stuff can get you up in the rankings faster than strict “White hat” stuff at times. There are also to types of SEO: Organic and Inorganic.

Organic SEO is little things you can do, in building a project, to grow the SEO. Clean, W3C-compliant code; clean, well written copy full of good information and keywords that users are searching for; frequent blog updates; links to the site as a good resource; and frequent visitors to the site are all good examples of organic SEO. Inorganic SEO involves paying for advertisements in the search engines: Google Adwords, for example, are examples of inorganic SEO, whereby paying Google, you appear higher. Those who have huge budgets and good resources can become very high in the rankings very quickly this way.

Usability, as it relates to Web development, is the intuitive, human interaction with the system. How quickly can users perform tasks? How willing are they to perform a function? How do users react to information given? Given a question or task, how does the user find the answer or perform the task? All these things are involved in the development of a usable GUI (graphic user-interface) that the client will use. A huge component of this is the KISS principal (also known as Ockham’s Razor) in which the superfluous is stripped away and the simplest interface is best.

For the most part, these two things live in harmony in a project. In fact, many good SEO tricks are great for usability! Copy, for instance, when well written, is great for search engines to find keywords and presentation of choice information on whatever topic’s being written about. Obviously, well-written copy is a wonderful way for users to find, quickly and easily, instructions, information, or the answer to their problems. Linking through sites is also a great way to increase SEO, yet it’s just as good for usability, delivering a clear link to repositories of useful information right then and there.

When these disciplines clash, however, things get nasty. Not to take sides, but it’s often Usability that suffers when the titans meet. SEO is quickly backed up with hard numbers, site metrics, and analytical data sets. Usability relies on trust of the developer – how they know how to build sites the right way with the right information in the correct structure. A technique to increase SEO is to have URLs (in your address bar) that have lots of keywords. for instance, if you really care about being #1 for palm beach real estate, your “management team page” might be buried under search engine friendly named folders: “http://www.yoursiteurl.com/palm-beach-homes/palm-beach-real-estate/palm-beach-community/your-palm-beach-realator-home-team.html”. This is chock full of awesome terms in your link. But what if I am a user who’s at an internet cafe? I’m cruising for real estate with my friends, and I want to share this link. Barring using TinyURL, I’m stuck with this bulky URL that’s friendly to Google, but it’s no friend to me.

This is true when copy gets out of hand, as well. If Google and other search engines can only index what they can “see”, most of what is indexed is copy. It would make sense then, to increase the amount of copy on a site so there’s more for the search engines to index. Adding more copy, however, quickly overwhelms the site visitor. We live in the age of the instant gratifications – knowledge is quickly at our fingertips and we can, and do expect to be given what information we need quickly. If users have to sift through huge amounts of copy on every page, or perhaps worse, deal with multiple pages with only a little copy and have to click through three or four pages to find information that could have been regulated to one page, then the site fails its human visitors.

It’s important to have a good balance between SEO and Usability. You want Google et al. to find you, but you also want to keep your site visitors coming back for more. Google might bring you traffic and you want Google to like you, but a good site will get humans coming back for more and bringing their friends to see your site. As big and powerful as she is, Google doesn’t have any friends she’ll bring to you.

I’ve been away for two weeks now. I was on vacation, so no updates then, then I was at my new job. This was none too fun. I’m not sure how long I’ll last. A huge problem with it all is the way the company came about: This group sold a ColdFusion-backed CRM tool to (primarily) real-estate clients. This turned into “can you build my Web site too?” which, of course, this company knew nothing about. So, a bunch of real-estate and sales professionals all get together and hire a few creative types to make these sites. Now, an agency is born from real-estate sales which means that the work flow is very, very backwards.

In an actual advertising agency, this is the work flow (for a Web project anyway): Account service finds new clients and makes sure they wanna come in. They present clients with a bid based on scope of work provided by the designers and developers. Then, once the client has signed the contract with the scope of work, the developers and designers help put together an information architecture – a flowchart of sorts that outlines the information and navigation – and then that’s approved by the client before a design is even thought out. Then, when the client approves the I.A., the creative team of the designers go to work. They present (usually) 3 comps to the client, an idea of what the final site will look like. The client will go back and forth with the creative team and pick one. Once the client gives approval, the developer team gets to work, cutting, slicing, and coding up the site (while this is all going on, the copywriter is busy writing copy for all the pages based on the I.A. that the client approved and the creative director’s instruction). Once the site is coded, the copy is approved by the client and the copy is then put into the site. Once the finished site is all loaded, the developer ports the site over and there’s a final site hand-off.

In this group: The account service comes to the development team with IA already done (this is really really messed up because the account service team, though experts in sales, are not developers. They don’t understand user interface and user experience like we do). They then give the team a promised deadline (they don’t even ask how long such a project would take, just “We promised the client six weeks” which after all the bullshitting back and forth with the client gives me about 2 weeks to code the whole damned thing) this is often due to the client turning over the keys to the castle to my company which effectively makes the company it’s own client and presents deadlines internally based on previous projects. I can’t argue because the account service (read:sales) are owners of the company. It’s like I’m working in the twilight zone advertising agency. Everything is done ass-backwards. The account service people were telling the creative team which photos to put on a page! This is, to me, wrong on so many levels – the creative director is above EVERYONE in an agency, they take direction from no-one and give direction to everyone. I was amazed at how little control and how backwards everything is done.

For my first three days, I was sweating bullets. I felt like someone had put a stone in the pit of my stomach and I couldn’t get rid of it! The last two days gave me a gleam of hope – I was called in two separate times to two different bosses office to explain to them agency work flow. They wanted to step up to the plate with the big advertising shops, but weren’t sure their process was going to float or sink them. I got to freely speak my mind and really let them know places where I thought they needed work. I made an information architecture that took a three-tiered navigation and 30 pages, and worked it down to just 8, pretty simple pages.

There’s hope yet for me here. I’m gonna try to stick it out for six months and see if I can take it. Wish me luck