Summary
Did you know that the SUS creates biases in your research, affecting one in five people? That’s right! People with disabilities, especially those who use assistive technology, are not considered by most of the questions in the SUS. As a designer, this could lead to you making design decisions that don’t take into account 20 percent of the visitors to your website. When the SUS was invented, the author encouraged people to change it to suit different needs. In this talk, Samuel Proulx from Fable will discuss how Fable adapted the SUS to work for assistive technology users. Drawing from over five thousand hours of research and testing involving assistive technology users, we created the Accessible Usability Scale (AUS). This presentation will include trends in AUS responses since it was released in December of 2020.
Key Insights
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Screen readers require highly semantic web design to allow efficient navigation by users.
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Screen reader users often speed up the voice to 400-800 words per minute to match typical reading speeds.
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Alternative navigation devices like head mice pose unique interaction challenges, such as difficulty with dropdown menus.
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Low vision users benefit from screen magnifiers combined with color inversion to reduce eye fatigue.
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Traditional think-aloud usability research creates high cognitive load for assistive tech users, requiring task chunking.
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Accessibility research labs can unintentionally exclude participants due to physical travel and assistive tech setup issues.
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The System Usability Scale (SUS) includes questions that assume uniform user abilities, limiting its effectiveness for people with disabilities.
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Fable adapted SUS questions to better reflect the realities and technical contexts of assistive technology users.
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Preliminary AUS results show screen reader users give lower usability scores than magnification or alternative navigation users.
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Inclusive research methods must be flexible and adaptable to diverse assistive technologies to gather more representative data.
Notable Quotes
"What screen readers allow us to do is jump directly to bits of content we are interested in to replicate the visual experience of skimming a web page."
"Most screen reader users prefer robotic voices so they can speed them up and read very quickly."
"Travel to usability labs can take longer than the research session itself for people with disabilities."
"Every piece of assistive technology is highly customized to meet the needs of each individual person."
"If I’m talking over my screen reader, the researcher has no idea what either of us is saying."
"The original SUS questions don’t consider the extra layer of technology that gets in the way for people with disabilities."
"One question says I would need the support of a technical person to use this system—well I am a technical user, but the system is inaccessible."
"Screen magnification just leans on the existing way most people design and interact with websites—changing size and color."
"Screen readers have to do the most work to interpret websites due to lack of visual cues, which explains lower usability scores."
"The Accessible Usability Scale is still an experiment and we welcome feedback, criticism, and modifications to improve it."
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