Amex Woes Highlight Common PDF Accessibility Problem

American Express has come under criticism, and potential legal action, for the lack of accessibility of its credit card website. A blind customer of American Express credit cards found that Amex's change in the presentation of its online credit card statements from HTML to PDF format effectively prevented him from accessing his financial information online.

Rourke, Chris. User Vision (2007). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Adobe Acrobat

Internal Search: Seven Ways to Ensure Your Users Can Find Your Information  

User Vision's top seven tips on how to ensure your internal search is capable of meeting the needs of your users.

Rourke, Chris. User Vision (2008). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Search

Usability Testing: Now and the Future

All councils and public sector organisations have a clear remit to make their information available and accessible to their citizens, and increasingly they are applying usability testing to gather empirical evidence of the effectiveness of their sites. Whether this is done by internal teams or external, independent organisations and consultants, usability testing is now part of a process applied by many site managers. Indeed usability is considered by SOCITM in their annual UK council site reviews, and is a critical part to citizen fining services and transacting online.

Rourke, Chris. User Vision (2007). Articles>Usability>Testing

WCAG 2.0 Preview: So What's New?

This article reviews the new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.0 and was published in SPIN Magazine. The article summaries the new guidelines and identifies key revisions and changes made to the original WCAG version 1.0.

Palmer, Mark. User Vision (2007). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards

Usability vs Branding? - Usability is Branding

I've been in the following scenario several times. I'm in a meeting room with the web and marketing teams and there is a raging debate about brand guidelines. A proposed improvement to the design contravenes the guidelines. One group think that branding is more important than usability. The other group think the opposite. They are both wrong. Usability is branding. It shapes people's opinions of your product or organisation.

User Vision (2008). Articles>Usability>Branding>Web Design

Ten Things You Should Know About WCAG 2.0

With the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines being made a Candidate Recommendation on 30th April 2008, many companies are starting to prepare for the arrival of the new Accessibility Guideline. What exactly is different though? User Vision's Mark Palmer takes you through some key things you should know about the document commonly known as WCAG 2.0.

Palmer, Mark. User Vision (2008). Articles>Accessibility>Standards

Economic Downturn Puts Website Usability into Focus

The economic pinch is encouraging more people to shop online, making website usability more important than ever. Those ecommerce sites that follow good usability practices will inevitably have a competitive advantage. What are the key things companies can do to make their site user friendly?

Paterson, Lorraine. User Vision (2008). Articles>Usability>E Commerce