On Monday 9th Feb I was privileged to be a part of the NZIRF’s first meeting organised by Auckland University of Technology and InternetNZ. I have to admit to feeling a bit of a fraud amongst group of academics but I was made very welcome. It was very interesting to hear the varied threads of internet-related research and topics that each attendee presented. Whilst I’ve been involved in some research recently, it isn’t at a stage to discuss publicly yet so I concentrated my presentation on Inclusive Research. Whilst I rapidly realised I had to define what I meant by inclusive as there is such a wide range of understanding it was great to be able to discuss ways to design online and other approaches so as not to create unnecessary and unintentional barriers to participation from the technology and tools used. This could be as simple as not insisting on telephone as the only way to interview as that makes it very hard for the Deaf; or by using only landlines to conduct a survey a surprisingly large sector of the population are immediately excluded as they don’t have them.
I left my group with 3 things to takeaway if they forgot the rest:
- No CAPTCHA
- Think about colour contrast and font
- Be flexible in the ways that people can respond
Useful Links
I also pointed to some great tools and resources that they could use such as:
- Paciello Colour Contrast Analyser
- The WAI Demo Good/Bad Website
- The WCAG Quick Ref (there’s an interesting use of quick but certainly better than the normative standard :))
- NZ Government Web Standards
- Webaim’s Designer Infographic and associated textual versions
- and Tom Smiths’s awesome FILTH guide to working with Word
.
- I also missed the Round Table Print Disability Resources (Powerpoint) so here they are.
Slides
I’m never too sure how useful slides are without context but here they are. They include all the links above.
InclusiveResearch – Slides from NZIRF 9/2/15
Next Steps
Thanks to InternetNZ and AUT for making the NZIRF possible. There’s likely to be a meet-up at Nethui 2015 in Auckland in July. See you there?