a11yTOConf2020

Tuskegee, Belmont And Me - Ethics And Accessible UX

Speaker: David Sloan
Twitter: @sloandr
Slides

General Notes

• Accessibility professionals know that there’s value in building on a11y standards conformance by working with people with disabilities
• If we focus on peak curve in a Bell Graph, we only
• Design for stress cases
• Design for diverse situations
• Inspiration book: Interaction Design by Sarah Rogers
• Involve people with disabilities in UX research
  • Validate our assumptions
  • Test our claims
• Generative research: help us explore and discover more about a problem space to define a design problem
• Evaluative research:
• There are many resources: blogs, articles, encouraging to include people with disabilities and diversity in your studies
• Are we doing enough user research with people with disabilities?
• It is difficult to share findings of studies done with people with disabilities
• Unethical research studies:
  • Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932-1972): exploited and violated human rights of those involved
  • Nazi’s studies during WWII
• The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and guidelines for protection of human subjects of research
• Belmont Report - Principle 1: Respect for persons: Treat people as autonomous agents.
• Recorded videos during User Research are valuable to stakeholders and developers alike. Make sure to get permission to use/share.
• Principle 2 - Beneficence:
  • protect people from harm
  • maximize possible benefits & minimize possible harms
• Think carefully how long do you want participants to interact with a product. Give them breaks/pauses.
• Your participant wellbeing is more important than your desire to obtain data from user research
• If you don’t spend time enough on recruitment process you might get bias results
• Seek diversity beyond accessibility needs you’re seeking to research
• Challenge your assumptions & Test your claims

Resources

• David Sloan: Here’s one good guide to involving people with disabilities in UX activities: http://www.uiaccess.com/accessucd/involve.html
• Kate (Canada Post) We use http://www.makeitfable.com to access a community of testers with disabilities to uncover usability issues
• Maria Acevedo: https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm
• David Sloan https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/read-the-belmont-report/index.html
• Kate (Canada Post) There’s a free 3-hour course on research ethics online in Canada: https://tcps2core.ca/welcome
• Beatriz (Accenture): Respect for persons in accessible UX research:
  1. accessible informed consent process
  2. avoid unnecessary deception
  3. don’t place undue demands on PwD to participate
  4. avoid undue intrusions of privacy
  5. also: hire regular participants as expert consultants
• Beatriz Gonzalez (she/her) this looks like a great course on the topic too. https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/research-ethics-an-introduction/11