I will soon be conducting more interviews with people with intellectual disabilities. I have three primary areas of interest:
- the sites they find inaccessible and accessible, which I am conveying as “easy to use”; (I will explore the reasons.)
- which site features do they find helpful or not, “like and dislike”; (The answers may help me choose for which sites I should create tutorials.) and
- what they would like to learn about using the Web. (This is to help inform me about the subject matter of future tutorials.)
These are the questions I will be asking of people:
- Which sites are hard to use but you really want to use?
- Which sites do you find easy to use?
- Which parts of Web sites do you like, and which do you dislike?
- What would you like to learn to do on the Web?
To obtain this information, I am visiting self-advocacy groups, and meeting in person with people with intellectual disabilities. I anticipate having a computer available at each interview so people can show me as well as tell me. I will be recording responses in narrative form.
Later in the project, as I design the site, I will need people to test it regularly and give me feedback every step of the way. I have not yet figured out how best to organize that, but I am open to suggestions.
Note: The W3C has a good article about Involving Users in Web Projects for Better, Easier Accessibility. I shall rely upon it to help guide my project.