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Conducting research in assistive technology has some interesting challenges. We discuss these challenges, share ideas for meeting them, and learn from each other.
Happy to announce that our new article just came out in the Assistive Technology journal! Read on to learn how we involved users when designing our Access Navigator app for alternative access assessments.
Dave Edyburn spent the last year reviewing over 900 articles on assistive technology and education. He shared the findings in several reports, and even compiled a database of all the articles. Read on for details!
2018 was an unusual, fun, and interesting year for Koester Performance Research. Here are some highlights of KPR’s work in the past year.
Wishing you all a Happy New Year! In the spirit of a new year’s energy, I took a look at KPR’s activities in the past year. 2018 was unusual, in that we’ve intentionally not been engaged in a large funded project, in order to leave some space and see what might take shape. One overarching goal this year was to share more of what we’ve learned and developed with the wider world. To that end, we revamped the KPR website, incorporated a blog, and set up new systems for communicating with people who are interested in what we’re doing. It’s still a work in progress, but has been enjoyable and seems useful so far. We also continued research, development, and service work within assistive technology. Read on for a few specific highlights.
Using third-party code, such as Bootstrap, Google Charts, shopping carts, and the like, to boost your website’s functionality is powerful and often necessary. But it can also introduce some accessibility problems, and those aren’t always easy to fix. Here are some tips on dealing with these issues.
This is the third in our series on testing and improving the accessibility of KPR’s websites. Previous posts focused on how we conducted systematic do-it-yourself accessibility testing and how we fixed the accessibility problems we found. Some of the toughest challenges involved dealing with third-party code. This post presents the main problems related to third-party code and gives some details about how we fixed them.
Continue reading “Web accessibility: challenges with third-party code”
We recently tested the accessibility of KPR’s websites. Here’s an overview of what we found and how we fixed it. Spoiler alert: tests revealed some major web accessibility issues.
We’ve been working on testing and improving the accessibility of KPR’s websites. The first step in this process was conducting systematic do-it-yourself accessibility testing, which we described in an earlier post. This post presents the main problems revealed by the tests and gives some details about how we fixed them.
Continue reading “Web accessibility testing: what we found and how we fixed it”
We recently got serious (finally) about testing and improving the accessibility of KPR’s websites. Here’s the recipe we used for our DIY accessibility testing, somewhat informal but quite effective.
This post is the first of a series focused on our web accessibility initiative. As a company that develops software, including websites, KPR has a responsibility to make sure that those sites and applications are accessible and usable to all users, regardless of disability. And, given the focus of our work on enhancing accessibility for computer users with disabilities, we have an extra imperative to get our web accessibility house in order. We’ve learned a lot through this process and hope that sharing some of those lessons here might help others who want to do something similar.
The first step in the process was to define a procedure, a recipe, that we could use to test the current state of accessibility for all of our websites. This needed to be something we could do ourselves (DIY) in a reasonable amount of time while still yielding good information about accessibility problems. I’ll share our DIY accessibility testing recipe in this post, and we’ll look at the accessibility problems we found and how we fixed them in future posts.
Continue reading “A recipe for DIY web accessibility testing”
Continuing our series on examining text entry rate data for people with physical disabilities, we look today in more depth at the statistical distribution of those data. A histogram is a great tool for visualizing a distribution and providing insights into a dataset.
As promised in our previous post, today we’re going to delve more deeply into our dataset of text entry rate across 177 individuals with physical disabilities. (If you haven’t seen the infographic and read about the creation of this dataset already, you might want to read that earlier post first.)
Continue reading “Text entry rate data: what can we learn from a histogram?”
We gathered the available data on computer text entry by people with physical disabilities and created this infographic. Results suggest that there is a long way to go to better support computer users with disabilities.
Sajay Arthanat and I continue organizing the available research evidence on text entry rates (typing speeds) for people with disabilities. I shared an overview of the findings in an earlier post. Here, I’ve added two new studies to the dataset and created an infographic describing the distribution of text entry rate across 177 individuals. Continue reading “Text entry rate for people with physical disabilities [Infographic]”
Join KPR along with practitioners and researchers from the assistive technology community at the RESNA 2018 conference. We’ll present on our AT-node research database along with tips on conducting assistive technology research.
As always, I’m looking forward to the RESNA annual conference, this year to be held in Washington, DC from July 11-15. I’ll be giving 3 presentations, along with Sajay Arthanat. Continue reading “KPR presenting at RESNA 2018 Conference”
![Text entry rate for people with physical disabilities [Infographic]](https://kpronline.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/text-entry-rate-infographic-cropped-1200x628-opt-1200x628.png)
