digital media access group
...excellent accessibility research and consultancy
Evaluator Base
The Digital Media Access Group believes strongly in the use of "real" evaluators when evaluating digital resources. In particular, while our expertise allows us to uncover many potential usability and accessiblity problems which people with disabilities may encounter, it is particularly beneficial to our clients to learn how real people use their sites, in order to find real problems. Therefore we have built up a potential evaluator base of around 160 people.
Our standard evaluations and audits normally use both people with and without disabilities. Generally, these evaluators come under a number of groups:
- Wide variety of ages, with an emphasis on the "older" user
- Visual Impairment
- Physical Disability
- Cognitive Impairment
Typically we use a small number of evaluators for our evaluations, supporting the idea that 5 independent evaluators is an optimum number for efficient, effective problem location. However, should the need occur for a larger population to be used in an evaluation, we have the resources to do so.
Note: based within a University, people assume that our evaluator base is made up of university students. We will be the first to emphasise our fortune in having access to a constantly changing population with possible disabilities, however the majority of our evaluator base comes from outside the university, in order to maintain a more realistic representation of users.