Conducting an expert review

Hi Matthew,

This is going to be a long response as you've asked a very open question that requires a lot of thought before you proceed any further. So grab a cup of coffee, sit back and relax before you proceed.

I'd like to give you a crude insight to the 2 areas that you will need to focus on; usability and accessibility, but to do this I'm obliged to explain the difference between the two. Unless a usability company is going to outsource the accessibility part to an expert, you should use two different companies. Keep reading to learn why.

Getting usability right is absolutely crucial to understand what your customer wants and how you can best serve it to them.

Your question leads me to believe you are new to usability so I recommend either surfing the web to learn the basics, or buy E-consultancy’s Usability & Accessibility Buyers Guide. The latter would be my first option as it will give you a good foundation of knowledge and equip you to choose the most appropriate solution from the extensive list of very well established companies. Be careful because there are a few that don’t live up to their claims.

Accessibility is an area that you might have overlooked as you only asked about 'Usability'. The two are distinctly different 'today'. You will need to think about accessibility to ensure you not only learn what your customer wants and how to best serve it to them, but also, how to ensure all potential customers can actually ‘access’ whatever you try to sell.

You would imagine that usability & accessibility fall under the same umbrella but they don’t. To put it crudely, usability is ‘user focused’ testing whilst understanding the principles of accessibility. Usability testing is not a technical method of testing and does not require people who understand the intricacies of technologies such as Flash, XML and Java. I’m not saying there are no usability companies with these capabilities. Accessibility is about understanding the principles of usability whilst being able to implement technical solutions that are accessible.

Accessibility is a word applied to Web site design guidelines, such as those created by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). By adhering to guidelines, it enables people with disabilities to access and use Web sites with special tools, such as text readers. Such sites are also accessible to visitors with impaired physical capabilities, such as deafness and dyslexia. The Internet has provided tremendous opportunities for people with disabilities to access information, purchase products and interact with others in a way that was previously impossible. However, many common and 'cutting-edge' Internet technologies actually reduce the degree to which people with disabilities can access information on the Web through assistive technologies.

Without turning this into an Accessibility related tread, I'd like to highlight that the disabled community have a spending power of £50 billion per annum in the UK so this is a big chunk of the apple pie that you don't want to cut off from your site. An accessible Web site that has been created with only the guidelines in mind could also turn into an unfriendly site, but you'd have to be pretty dumb or in a serious hurry to do that. There are lots of other good commercial reasons for choosing the accessible route but I won’t go into them now.

There are some people in the industry who believe that, because usability testing considers (or at least should consider) all types of disabilities, it automatically addresses the issue of accessibility. The fact is that usability and accessibility should amount to the same thing and fall under one methodology for design and development purposes. However, this is some way off. It will take another 12 to 18 months for the industry to recognise that Web sites should be built to allow access to users who use assistive technologies, slow connections, handheld devices such as mobile phones and PDAs, old browsers, and so on.

My recommendation is to turn to the pages of the E-consultancy Usability & Accessibility Buyer's Guide and seek the advice from the two different companies. Alternatively, you could engage with a company that claims to do both but ensure you have their work validated by a third party to ensure it complies with the stated level. I will be more than happy to point you in the right direction of many free accessibility resources and tools when the time is right, tools such as CSS and HTML Validators and colour analysers. Please don’t use Bobby as your only means for validating accessibility and don’t touch a company that uses it as their main method of testing for compliance!

There are many experts out there that specialise in different areas so you need to choose the one that's right for your requirements. For example, using CSS is the best method for Web site layout. However, some Web sites require the use of complex tables for layout so understanding how to implement them in an accessible manner is equally important as understanding the fine tuning of CSS. 

Kind regards,
Paul