[Air-L] social change?

bytetime bytetime at gmail.com
Sat Jul 28 18:40:02 PDT 2012


Hi all

As part of my work, I routinely work with web developers and go to many
industry related gab fests, where usability and accessibility is a key
issue, especially in complying with recommendations with the  Web
Transition Strategy , where all Australian government websites have to be
WCAG2 AA compliant by the end of 2012.

I agree with Radhika's comments. The challenge of determining whether
written content is accessible and understandable has been a huge part of
the challenge of my work with livinggreener.gov.au - a site built using UCD
principles and designed to foster sustainable behaviour change. A big focus
in the conception of the project was effectively delivering the
sustainability message - as research revealed that the average science
understanding of the Australian public was around year 5, or 10 years of
age.

There are many ways you can test the usability of the interface with
analytics and surveys, but to get to whether people understand the written
content requires a deeper inquiry into their information needs and if they
have been met. We have used detailed surveys in the past focused on the
written content in conjunction with usability testing and user feedback to
determine site enhancements and improvements. This has worked quite well
for us.

If you are interested, here is a recent blog post about
Drupal<http://mediakult.wordpress.com/2012/07/28/how-can-government-innovate-with-drupal/>that
touches on the challenge of content. Personally, I think there are
ways to many ways to deal with the usability and accessibility of an
interface - accessibility of content needs to be addressed quite
differently. Usable design attract audiences, targeted, appropriate content
will keep them there long and bring them back next time.


Tracey

On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 at 8:42 AM, André Brock <andre.brock at gmail.com> wrote:

> via Radhika:
>
>      I find many usability surveys that test for how the interface is
> usable or
>      not - but they dont necessarily test for the effectiveness of content
> in
>      relation to conveying the social change and advocacy part …
>
> This describes information science in a nutshell.  Can i steal?
>
> André
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-- 
Dr Tracey M Benson (aka bytetime)
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