One of our senior consultants specialising in accessibility presented a case study with Shane Snow of Transport Direct and Andreas Bork, team leader of the Atos Origin development team, at this year’s RNIB Techshare conference on 18th November in Birmingham, UK.  The annual conference highlights the role of technology in the everyday life of people with sight problems.  This article summarises the main content of the presentation.

An Introduction to Transport Direct – Shane Snow

Transport Direct is a unique new travel information and journey planning website for all of Britain covering car and all public transport (bus, coach, ferry or plane) journeys.  It has been publicly available since 12th July 2004.  It is unique in that it allows users to:

• Compare train/coach options with car journeys to make sure they travel in the most efficient way
• Find the quickest car route that takes into account predicted traffic levels at different times of the day so that drivers can make informed decisions about when to travel
• Buy train and coach ticket from affiliated retail sites without having to re-enter journey details;
• Find out about rail and coach fares
• Find out about journeys using more than one type of public transport  that they might not have thought were possible before using the site.

The website presents a wealth of complex travel planning and real time  information from all over the UK in one consistent interface. Most people need to make new or unfamiliar journeys from time to time. So, to be successful, Transport Direct will need to usable and accessible to a wide range of people with differing degrees of experience and ability and we firmly believe that users need to be involved at every stage along the design and build of the system. To this end we have carried out over 100 hours of 1 on 1 user testing including 23 people with disabilities where we have focussed on the needs of those with screen readers. We will continue to involve users as enhancements are made to our services.

The site was officially launched on 30 December 2004 and enhancements will be made to the service in 2005 including:

• Core elements of the service available to people on the move through smart phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs);
• Price based journey planning so that users can browse fares for cheap options in a selected time period.
   

Ensuring Website Accessibility – System Concepts

System Concepts has been providing accessibility support to Transport Direct since October 2003 including:

• Two phases of accessibility testing
• A quality review of ‘Alt text’
• An audit against the W3C’s Web
• Accessibility Initiative guidelines
• Redesigning one section of the website.

In this presentation System Concepts focused on the involvement of disabled and specifically visually impaired users.  We firmly believe that “although guidelines are extremely important, testing a website with disabled users is key to ensuring its accessibility”.

The first phase of work involved testing a pre-live version of the Transport Direct website.  Although there was very little time to implement any of the findings in the first release, Transport Direct were keen to identify any potential ‘show stoppers’ which would affect users’ successful use of the core functionality of the website.

System Concepts ran 19 accessibility tests with participants with different disabilities.  Nine of the tests were conducted at System Concepts facilities and the remainder were either at the participants’ home or colleges.  The participants comprised

• 3 users of screen magnification (Zoomtext, MAGic, Supernova)
• 3 users of screen readers (JAWS – various versions, Navigator Braille display)
• 1 user of large text
• 1 user with colour deficient vision
• 2 users of British Sign Language
• 4 users of alternative input methods (e.g. Dragon software)
• 3 users with learning difficulties
• 2 users with dyslexia (who required changed colour settings).

Each participant took part in a 90-minute test of the website attempting a series of three tasks, each which involved planning a journey between two specified locations.  Few of the users were able to complete all of the tasks set and a number of issues were identified.  We prioritised the issues into four levels, critical, serious, medium and low priority.

Phase 1 Testing - Critical Issues
In the first phase of testing there were three critical issues all relating to screen reader users.  One of these issues involved missing alt text with the other two relating to lack of non-visual feedback and to the non-linear presentation of journey results.

As a result of these findings Transport Direct’s developer Atos implemented several changes to the website including the missing Alt text and label text.  We worked with a screen reader user to review the Alt text and label in the context of completing tasks to ensure that it was sufficiently meaningful and helpful.  This led to a few minor revisions.

Phase 2 Testing – Serious Issues
We then carried out the second phase of testing, using two screen reader users and one user of magnification software.  This time there were no Critical issues and the users were all able to complete the tasks set.  However, there were two serious issues.  Our magnification software user inverted her text which meant in most cases she would view white text on a black background.  However, the warning message of red on white when inverted became navy blue on black making it unreadable.  

The second issue was one of repetition of information making the website confusing and difficult to use for the screen reader users.  There are several instances on the website where a user action leads to a page refreshing.  This is a result of the website not using JavaScript, a decision which had been made because JavaScript is not accessible by older screen readers.  However, the way the pages were presented meant that the existing information appeared at the top of the new page with the new information presented beneath it.  Upon hearing the old information presented again with no knowledge of the new information being presented further down the page, the screen reader users thought that their previous action hadn’t worked or that there was a problem with a system.

Although, strictly speaking, if the users persevered they could get the information they required (indicating the page was technically accessible) they did not find this particularly usable and it led to frustration and dissatisfaction.  Left unchanged, this issue would probably result in some people abandoning the website.

As a result Transport Direct commissioned System Concepts to carry out a redesign of this section.  We spent time with two blind screen reader users discussing their requirements and devising solutions.  The constraining factor was that the actual layout of the pages could not be changed.  This led to the recommendation of various jump links to facilitate screen reader users efficient movement through the process.  This solution will be implemented and tested in the next release.

The Developer’s Perspective – Andreas Bork

The development team face a wide variety of challenges in this project, including:

• Steady enhancements to site functionality and complexity
• Making the website accessible to multiple browsers and assistive technologies
• The impact of revisions on the accessibility of the website
• The impact of the progress in technology. 

A number of issues and lessons that had been highlighted through the lifecycle of the project, including:

• The importance of considering accessibility early in the design lifecycle
• The importance of working cooperatively with other specialists, e.g. accessibility and usability
• Ensuring the dissemination and assimilation of accessibility knowledge throughout the development team
• Ensuring familiarity with assistive technologies and the appropriate quality standards

Conclusion – System Concepts

The Transport Direct website is continuously evolving.  Since we carried out our accessibility work, a new version of the website has been released.  We believe that further releases will include the recommendations from the redesign and the resolution of other issues.  More accessibility input is planned for 2005.

Are you interested in helping us with usability and accessibility tests?  If so, and you have a disability, Leslie Fountain would be very interested to hear from you.  Contact her on  This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  or phone 020 7240 3388.