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2002 – The SAP Design Guild Meets Accessibility and More...

By Gerd Waloszek, SAP AG, SAP User Experience – Februar 14, 2002

I became aware of the accessibility issue for the first time at the CHI 2001 in Seattle. The CHI 2001 had the motto "Anyone. Anywhere" and covered a wide range of accessibility topics from the interaction perspective. Greg Vanderheiden, coauthor of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines from the (WCAG 1.0) and an accessibility herald held the closing plenary of the CHI 2001. His speech focused on future perspectives and research directions in standard mass-market products and systems. He spoke about how future products could be used anytime and anywhere, by young and old alike and by people with certain disabilities. I was very much impressed by his talk. At the CHI 2001 I also met Keith Elliott who now heads SAP's Accessibility Competence Center (ACC) at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, and we shortly talked about accessibility. So the stage was prepared - but I did not realize at that time how important software accessibility would become in the course of 2001. Probably, only few people were aware of the fact that Section 508 became legislation in the US in June 2001 and what its impact would be on software development, design - and sales.

But things were moving fast last year. The ACC was formed as SAP's answer to the challenge of developing and offering software that meets the accessibility standards defined by Section 508 and the W3C. The SAP Design Guild, on the other hand as a medium for user interface and graphic designers tries to promote important ideas in the design field. So, it seemed to be a good idea to contact the ACC for a cooperative edition on accessibility in order to promote accessibility within the UI community inside and outside of SAP. The ACC agreed - and here it is, the 4th edition of the SAP Design Guild featuring accessibility and offering a wide range of articles, from articles about the work of the ACC, articles on the current regulations, to articles presenting personal experience reports from blind users.

Publishing an edition on accessibility cannot be without consequences for the SAP Design Guild Website itself. The SAP Design Guild team took accessibility seriously and improved its Website in a number of ways in order to make it more accessible. Of course, we could not achieve a jump from 0% to 100% accessibility, but we made considerable progress towards that goal. First of all, we simplified the layout so that pages can be resized more flexibly. We allowed incorporated font sizing via the browser. Both measures allow visitors to use the Website in a variety of conditions including 800*600 screens. Large fonts also help users with low vision to access the SAP Design Guild. Image tags have been maintained and print versions provided, first for articles and recently for guidelines as well. Now the content of the SAP Design Guild is accessible even without a computer, for example in the garden or in the bed. We also dismissed the frame design to allow for bookmarking of pages (for guidelines we still use frames but now they open in a new window and are self-contained).

We combined these changes with a restructuring of the Website. We also changed the navigation schema to a two-level navigation approach as is found on many Websites and in the portal framework of SAP Portals (in effect, we mimic that framework). The SAP Design Guild now features three major contents areas, Home & Services, Resources, and Community. The Home & Services area offers general information on the SAP Design Guild and services, such as a sitemap and a forthcoming FAQ. The Resources area has been simplified and still is the core of the SAP Design Guild, containing all the guidelines that are open to the public. Now you enter this area with an overview of all available guidelines. This will - as we hope - make it easier for you to find what you need.

The third section is the Community area, which had already been restructured last year. So, we did not change that area. Here you still find the philosophy section, the editions, editorials, design tidbits, and user contributions. An event page informs about upcoming events in the design field. As already announced, there is a new edition, and we will continue with new design tidbits with a couple of articles on page layout in the near future. Our "problem child" is still the forum, which is currently closed for technical reasons but will be open soon. There is still little traffic in our forum, and many people wonder why. One of the reasons may be that SAP developers and UI designers are busy people and have little time for delving into discussion groups. I am not sure whether that is really true. Another reason may be that many visitors want to pose their questions personally and use other communication channels. We have much more activity in the SAP Design Guild inbox and also receive plenty of personal mails from visitors. To some degree, the SAP Design Guild team has become a design and UI hotline, which is a good thing. But of course, there are questions that are beyond our scope, so we try to forward them to knowledgeable people inside SAP. To let other visitors profit from the answers, we took a closer look at all the mails we received and looked for the most often asked questions. Currently, we are in the process of extracting the essence from these questions and collect them in an FAQ page that we will publish soon.

 

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