UX seems to be everywhere today. Large and small companies are learning the importance of it trough achieving better success if they dedicate more time understanding the user needs.
But personas, wireframes and workflow prototypes are not enough when you start UI implementation. Everything will end up in code, and if that segment of the UX is not taken care of, your hard UX design work might be wasted.
Although, the interactivity and desired visual appearance can be achieved with non-accessible client side output, or at least with screen-reader friendly or ARIA equipped markup, the final experience we are offering for accessibility is still poor and not of much help for users in need.
It is not enough to just read the navigation or page. It might be good enough for a blog or news page with static and linear content, but for web applications, tablet and mobile applications (direction it seems we are heading to) – it just doesn’t work.
We need designed workflows and audio interfaces that offers smooth experience for the users in need. Bombarding the user with audio output by just reading the whole page word by word is totally useless. Closest we should get in desigining and implementing accessible user experience are the traditional telephone bank services (the best practices, of course, there are some bad ones out there as well). Your markup should be able to offer this alternative layer of accessibility and user experience, you just need to write it with accessible user in mind, or develop alternative audio widgets for your framework.
Writing, or should I say tracing this post on AndroidwpToGo app. Since i moved from G1 to N1, only thing I miss is the fast typing physical keyboard. Soft keys are not cutting it for me.
When I say physical, I mean full qwerty keyboard in comfortable landscape model. Small squeezed keys found on some devices are even worse then the soft ones.
But, a friend suggested Swype to me, and I was amazed from the creative approach by the developers, implementing an oldish but valuable IBM research introducing new way of typing by tracing your words on the soft keyboard. Writing the post with this input method I’m more then impressed with its usability. The learning curve is very short, just after writing two tweets you get familiar with it. Word accuracy is excellent, offering choice of suggested words if your trace was a bit crazy.
Small downturn is you have to switch off autosuggestion if you want to type in different language then English. There are many users like myself using English as first language but with need to communicate with second language without switching keyboard layouts, although if your language is supported on the device, Swype offers very easy switch between the available keyboard layouts.
Turning your device to landscape mode will give you an error, but this is still trial version and not official release, so this iI completely forgivable. Having said that, I’m thinking how tracing can be implemented with two thumbs combination when turning the device in landscape mode. I leave that challenge to creative developers of the very usable Swype keyboard.
This input method is also a good accessibility potential. Adding TTS and speaking out selected keys while tracing and speaking out the word to be inserted, can make this keyboard a good companion to apps designed to utilize assisting technology available on the latest Android releases.
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