When RightNow developed the Nov ’09 release of the customer portal, we wanted to make sure that we were able to go above and beyond ‘checklist compliance’ and actually make our technology usable for real disabled people.
The PAS 78 process was instrumental in guiding our efforts and served as the impetus to conduct extensive user interviews, generate personas, and perform summative usability testing when we developed the release.
It’s worth noting that PAS 78 is set to expire this year and will be replaced with BS 8878. The British Standards Institute has been at the cutting edge of defining user experience (UX) process for accessibility and we look forward to seeing the final version BS 8878 in 2010. In the mean time, there is decision chart out of the draft standard I’d like to share with you. This diagram is intended to help organizations select appropriate technologies from vendors:
Figure 1: Decision Diagram
Just because a vendor meets the technical requirements of section 508, WCAG, or claims to have followed a human centered design process doesn’t necessarily mean that their technology will be successful for you.
Get your users involved and have them interact with the software either through Contextual Inquiry or Usability Testing to determine if this technology can be successfully (and easily!) utilized to solve your business problem. A little effort spent early on to identify the vendor with the best usability for your context of use will go a long way towards ensuring you have a successful project.
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