First pilot test with an actual user - Asoka Sir

Asoka sir, a lecturer, computer programmer and a web designer is invited for our first pilot test. Thursday April 21, 2011 around 10am, we managed to setup our system in ADMTC lab.

Initially the speaker setup was horizontal as in the picture. Thus the test object is seated in the center of the horizontal space.

Myself and Kanishka went to Art faculty and take Asoka Sir to the ADMTC lab. He was ready to come with us as discussed before. He asked Kanishka to take him to the UCSC Software Development Unit, because he got some problems with a php application he developed which includes Sinhala Unicode. Now you can guess his level of technical knowledge!

Then we started the experiment. At the very first time when traversing on the home page, he got scared when the sound comes from the behind. There we found another reason to accept the fact which is pointed by Prasad sir "the vertical layout is more suitable than the horizontal layout in a 2D sound environment. They already have an idea of the current layout of the monitor. Then we changed the speaker layout to the horizontal plane.

Following are some of the changes has to be done according to his comments;

• Use 'enter' instead of 'esc' to get out from a text box after typing the text.
• Before focus a text box use arrow keys to traverse on the page while listening, after focus use arrow keys to traverse inside the entry.
• Increase the speed of screen reading.
• Use 'ctrl' key to stop reading the page whenever user wants to.
• Add a sound clip or a tactical thing like "please wait" when processing and end of the process "Welcome". Otherwise they might be confused and could do unnecessary stuff which may lead to crash the system.
• Change the screen reader to a better one like "e-speak".
• Can introduce shortcut keys for complex navigations (e.g.: move to top left entry -> home key).

He also suggested us to do further researches on non-visual desktop access.

His final comment on our approach is;

For a typical non-technical computer user, the content of the web page is more important than the shape.

But for a web designer this concept is really helpful. Now they have to ask from somebody else if the position of an element is right or wrong. With this kind of environment they can work their own!