[games_access] Accessibility Terminology (John R. Porter)

[Ian Hamilton]

Bit of a UX tangent now sorry but yep the point was basically that in general terms testing with disabled people will uncover the same kind of general findings, and also extra ones due to the disability. Basically her point was about if you don't have much in the way of resources and can only test with a few people, a disabled person will be better 'value' as they'll give you a wider range of feedback. But of course ideally you'd have plenty of iterative testing with representative demographics that contain appropriate numbers of different impairments for those demographics. 
Message: 3
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:51:10 -0700
From: "John R. Porter" <jrporter at uw.edu>
Subject: Re: [games_access] Accessibility Terminology
To: IGDA Games Accessibility SIG Mailing List <games_access at igda.org>
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<CADWyad86amtNxfAg6L9WkzU0fx7God3pduZEYuCtik4cu__2uQ at mail.gmail.com>
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Right. Like Ian said, 'accessibility' is definitely a term that explicitly
implies impairment of some sort. 'Usability' is the more general term you
hear used.

As for user testing being exclusively carried out with disabled
individuals, yeah, I've heard of it. It's often called "extreme user
testing," as per the corresponding method in the IDEO toolkit. I'm in the
user-centered design field, and while conducting user tests with the
disabled is definitely something I advocate, I would be *very* hesitant to
do it exclusively. You can get interesting data, to be sure, but it's data
about a niche user population nonetheless.

-John
 		 	   		  
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