beTech :: Evolve Already

Tired of form spam? Doug Chestnut recommends reCAPTCHA—a free and very intriguing CAPTCHA service from Carnegie Mellon University. It’s one of those projects that seems so simple in hindsight that it’s a wonder no one ever thought of it before.

ReCAPTCHA serves up an accessible, secure means for ensuring that your comment forms, email forms, etc. are being submitted by an actual human being and not some clever spam bot. What’s more, by completing the CAPTCHA phrases, your users are actually helping Carnegie Mellon digitize its book collection (the phrases contain text that is unreadable by the OCR computer programs). Brilliant!

More Info from reCAPTCHA Site

• It’s Free! Yep, reCAPTCHA is free. The only reason we would charge is if you are a large corporation that uses a lot of our bandwidth, or if you require special services from us.
• It’s Useful. Why waste the effort of your users? By using reCAPTCHA instead of other CAPTCHA implementations, you are helping to digitize books.
• It’s Easy. reCAPTCHA is a Web service. As such, adopting it is as simple as adding 4 lines of code on your site. For many applications and programming languages such as Wordpress and PHP we also have easy-to-install plugins available. We generate and check the distorted images, so you don’t need to run costly image generation programs.
• It’s Accessible. Most other implementations of CAPTCHAs block visually impaired individuals, who cannot read images of distorted text. reCAPTCHA, on the other hand, has an audio test that allows blind people to freely navigate your site.
• It’s Secure. reCAPTCHA is run by the original creators of CAPTCHA and has the highest security standards. Many other implementations of CAPTCHAs can be easily broken.

Though user experience (UX) design isn’t necessarily bleeding edge technology, its a crucial factor of any technology’s success, particularly large complex information systems like the web. Considerations like information architecture, usability, accessibility, and aesthetics, applied in the right way, make a user interface really sing. So, it’s only natural that beTech should toss UX into its mix while trying to stir up tech enthusiasm at UVa. Right?

Let me know you think so by joining me (and hopefully many others) in the Byrd room of the Harrison/Small building at noon Thursday January 18th for the first beTech User Experience Group meeting.

The beTech UX Group aims to bring together UVa website and software producers to pursue knowledge of UX design best-practices through special beTech events and initiatives. UVa webmasters, web designers, software designers, programmers, media producers of all types, and communicators will all hopefully find something useful in the focused community and opportunities this group has to offer.

Some of the pursuits and issues we’ll address include:

• User Interface Design
• Information Architecture
• Usability Engineering
• Interaction Design
• Web Accessibility
• Human Computer Interaction
• Information Visualization
• Graphic Design
• Multimedia Production (A/V, Flash, Animation, Games)
• Writing and Editing

A few timely initiatives ripe for the beTech UX Group to start, if we’re so inclined, include:

• Creating a first-class central web/software usability testing lab available to the entire UVa community
• Creating and stewarding a website that showcases the best of user interface design at UVa
• Recruiting and regularly engaging representatives of UVa website user groups (students, faculty, staff, alums, etc.) to provide them a persistent voice in our website design processes

Needless to say, a lot of what we’ll chew on will be in regards to user testing and ways of gaining insight into user needs. But fear not starvation of your creative soul; we’ll seek plenty of juicy design and communication nourishment as well. Ugliness and miscommunication, after all, are user experiences we want to avoid creating.

So come on out on the 18th, and bring a lunch (á la beHungry.) Currently, we don’t have a presenter lined up. But in the interest of getting this group rolling, our first meeting can simply be a time for casual camaraderie. And it might be set against a backdrop slideshow featuring user interface design patterns, just to inspire a little focused conversation. Of course, if we can snag a presenter, the format is certainly open to change. If you are interested in presenting or have a good presentation/workshop idea, please email me at jml4n@virginia.edu, IM me at (AIM) runamonk7, or give me a call at 924-7099.

The University’s recent purchase of a site-wide license for Usablenet’s LIFT Text Transcoder offers a text-only view of sites and web services that is optimized for users with functional limitations, or for “low fidelity” browsers. Join the beTech bunch next Thursday (October 19), as Steve Johnson demonstrates the LIFT technology, and offers tips to webmasters who wish to optimize the LIFT version of their sites and services. He will also give an overview of the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) and offer some practical techniques for accessible web development.

Steve Johnson is a Senior Web Developer in the office of Web Communications at U.Va. After graduating from U.Va. in 2003 with a B.A. in Cognitive Science, Steve worked as a project manager for a local web development company before coming to work here. His areas of interest include information architecture, human factors, and system design.

Get speedy accessibility reports with a new web application called FAE, the Functional Accessibility Evaluator. The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign developed FAE to facilitate the development of accessible pages based on their best practices. The best practices are worthy of a good look in their own right:

The primary purpose of these HTML/XHTML Best Practices is to improve the accessibility of web resources at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign for students, faculty, staff, and the general public. The typical approach to web accessibility is a “repair” approach which focuses on meeting the technical requirements of either the Section 508 or W3C WCAG 1.0 accessibility standards. This accessibility repair usually results in the resources becoming more “technically accessible” but still remaining functionally unusable by many people with disabilities.

These Best Practices avoid this problem by focusing on the functional requirements that improve access to all users, including people with disabilities. They are inspired by the needs of people with disabilities but are designed to give all users more options and control when accessing web resources, hence the name “user-centered” design practices. In this user-centered approach, less assumptions are made about what technologies will be used to access a web resource and more options are provided that allow use of a broader range of technologies and the ability to restyle information for their own needs. Since all users benefit from this design approach, developers can functionally test their web resources using common web browsers and extensions to see if their resources conform to the user-centered design approach.

Running beTech’s home page through FAE produced a few accessibility failures that were easy enough to correct (language declarations, navigation list headers, etc.) and pointed out a few that require structural changes or compromises. For instance, it caught the fancy JavaScript that creates abbr/acronym tags on the fly and demanded a corresponding onfocus attribute for every onmouseover attribute. It took a bit of PHP jiggling to get it corrected but now we’re one step closer to some pretty decent accessibility on our home page. How do your pages stack up?

Let’s be honest, when looking at web accessibility across Grounds, there’s room for improvement. Many first-level web pages struggle to meet the Priority 1 WAI Conformance Levels and some deeper, less-reviewed pages are downright decrepit. As web professionals, we all have a responsibility to develop to the highest level of Web Standards possible–and that certainly includes addressing accessibility. It’s a daunting challenge and one that increases in complexity every day as new technologies and tricks become de rigueur.

Witness the rise of Ajax over the past year. Only now that the technology is more widely understood are there any substantial discussions taking place to address the responsibility issues; i.e., Web Standards and accessibility. SitePoint’s James Edwards takes several shots at creating accessible Ajax in his recent article Ajax and Screenreaders: When Can it Work? Unfortunately, his experimentation didn’t provide a solution. The conversation, however, has begun and we look forward to continuing it at this Wednesday’s beTech presentation Real World Ajax and Asynchronous User Interfaces.