stevenclark.com.au

This post pushes a point I wanted to make in yesterday’s post titled Support your Independent Thinkers. My examples were unfortunately a little personal and detracted somewhat from the intention of the article.

A set of basic assumptions (getting more support) being pushed forward by some high profile standardistas and accessiblistas in 2007 include:

1. Users are now educated about the web
2. Users now understand the concepts of computers and therefore the web
3. Users have been on the web now for over a decade, and
4. Users experiences aren’t our responsibility (such as text resizing) when it comes to features either available in the web browser or which should be available in the web browser

These are largely flawed assumptions. I can show example after example of people who don’t know enough about the web according to that perspective. What about first time users? Cognitive disabilities? How much harder is an interface to interpret in a second language if we are going to assume any set of knowledge based criteria on the user? Even I don’t know more than three or four keyboard shortcuts so how am I expected to demand that of everyone out there?

The hard part to reconcile is the same people advocate universal accessibility. But with assumptions about technical ability, intelligence and educational opportunity as a premise of entry to the medium? I’m a little disheartened.

There is to some extent, and always has been, a cult of personality in the world of standardistas and accessiblistas. These assumptions, regardless of the pedigree of their origin, are dangerous. I should also be able to infer from that unordered list that I can now use pixels safely for font sizing? Assume that Flash and JavaScript could be enabled by the average user onto a computer? And if someone would just move to the first world and get a job they could afford a kick arse gaming machine with high bandwidth (sarcasm is intentional). No. So why are those premises in the ordered list different? It will always be scarey territory to demand the user be anything or assume any set of abilities as a generality.

Yet this year has seen this unordered list’s assurances, from almost iconic personalities, that now everyone knows how to use the browser. Not only that but we’ll stop trying to assist some users on the grounds that they should know better or some software company has failed them. That’s just a lot of bollocksy-bollocks-crock! Sorry but if you can justify any of that with a straight face then go ahead because I’m kind of lost on the rationale. Are we saying that AJAX won some kind of DHTML war and now we’re changing the colour of our pieces? Is this like dumbing down an alt attribute so that Flickr can get under the bar for a HTML 5 touchdown?

Does all of this thinking come from associating with too many geeks and bloggers? Perhaps. Most users aren’t developers. If you make personas in your process apply that rationale to the personas and tell me what you come up with… I leave you with Willie Nelson’s I’m a Worried Man. After all these are only my opinions and take them or leave them. Food for thought.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 9:04 pm and is filed under accessibility, business, usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.