Sites like Rightmove.co.uk are already pretty well established in this space so building market share won’t be a breeze. However, both Tesco and Google are trusted names in the UK and Google already offers property search in the US and Australia, so it should be reasonably easy to port this offering across. Tesco has tried to do this in the past, but had to pull out due to legal challenges from estate agents, but now the Office of Fair Trading has recommended reforms to this industry which will allow the entry of players like Google and Tesco.

Tesco seems to be taking advantage of this by launching a website called iSold which lets people sell their home for a flat £999 fee. Moves like this have the potential to revolutionise the way property is sold in the UK and estate agent take-up may not be a crucial factor, as it could pave the way for increasing numbers of private sales.

Concerns about hidden problems and the plain unfamiliarity with the process tend to be the barriers to private sales at the moment. But the credibility and trust that may come with big names of Tesco and Google, along with detailed guidance for sellers, could alleviate these issues. Either way, user experience will be key and Google will likely focus on this. As a result, others may eventually have to focus on this as well to continue to compete.

If these developments take place, house buyers/sellers and renters could benefit from not only greater choice at lower costs but hopefully a higher bar set for user experience.  Making selling and buying homes easier is not just a great thing for consumers but may well act as an instrument for a quicker economic recovery.

Photo credit: I See Modern Britain via Flickr / Creative commons

• Myspace – 4%
• Facebook – 50%
• Twitter – 19%
• Bebo – 1%
• Friends Reunited – 1%
• LinkedIn – 5%
• Other – 7%
• None of them are easy to use – 12%

Looking at those results, there’s clearly a correlation between the voting and the popularity of the social networks in question - no surprise really because the more you use a website the easier you will find it to use.

The difference between social networks and other websites is that the sites themselves are a pass-time, so users can (and are often happy to) learn how to use them properly. On other sites they usually wouldn’t be prepared to take the time.

I think the results might be very different if you were to have a sample of people that had never used any of these sites before, and you carried out usability testing on all the sites. Given the simplicity of Twitter’s proposition, I would expect that it’s the easiest to use for a beginner as there’s far less to learn compared to say Facebook or  any other social network.

I’d be interested to hear what you make of these results…

When I started using VRT, I could barely read but had to read “training text” for the computer to learn my voice. My mother had to sit behind me, whispering the text into my ear in short phrases, which I repeated into the microphone. I was using Dragon Naturally Speaking version 5. It was hard work, but I persevered as this was the last chance saloon for me as I was unable to write and typing was painfully (literally!) slow. I adopted the “good practices” recommended by the software supplier, such as correcting any recognition errors as I went along using the “Correct That” function, rather than overtyping. The result was I achieved a recognition level of over 98%, talking in a natural way, at normal talking speed.

So, what about the Edinburgh and Stamford Universities’ research?  The BBC report says:

Computers failed to understand men’s speech because they make “umm” and “err” sounds more frequently.

Comment: I could have told them this ten years ago! Of course sloppy speech makes recognition levels bad and perhaps men umm and err more than women! People with speech ticks such as saying “y’know” in every sentence also have problems. Isn’t there and old computing saying of “trash in, trash out”?

Computers made mistakes with words which sound similar and can occur in similar contexts, such as “I saw him” or “I saw them”.

Comment: This is a good point. They ought to try “I scream” and “ice cream”. In one of my Religious Studies essays I had “cheeses of Nazareth” leading his disciples. I have however got round this now and I’ll tell you how in a later blog.

Variations in pitch, tone and speed can also cause the system to misunderstand voices.

Comment: Not for me; even though my voice broke, my good practices carried me through and I can talk as fast I want to.

It then said the research was to “improve the accuracy of automated ticket booking lines.” Ah!!! This research was not for people like me after all. It was all about replacing call centre staff with machines; this software would have to deal with any voice without the benefit of any training! Perhaps, if they crack this problem, it will eventually benefit people who cannot hand write or maybe it will be so expensive, it will remain the preserve of the major corporates.

Only the future will tell; until then, I’ll keep using my Dragon Naturally Speaking software coupled with some common sense good practices.

Accessible PDFs

PDF files have always been embedded in web pages and that’s not likely to change in the near future. The real challenge here is making sure that the information in the PDF can be accessed by all users, as screen reader and screen magnifier users have traditionally had problems with PDFs. However, screen readers can now read aloud PDF files and they can be magnified by screen magnifiers.

Creating a new PDF

Firstly, you’ll need to make your Word document accessible through the following steps:

• Properly label headings and ensure they’re correctly nested
• Assign alternative text to images
• Follow best practice writing for the web

To create the PDF you then need to select the toolbar icon:

The alternative way of creating PDFs, that is, printing to Adobe PDF should not be used. This latter method does not tag the PDF document, meaning that all heading information is lost.

After the PDF has been created, you must then check that the document is properly tagged and bookmarked.

Converting existing PDFs

With Acrobat Writer, it’s possible to modify an existing PDF through the following steps:

• Add new tag
• View, Re-order, Rename, Modify, Delete or Create tags
• Update the reading order
• Add alternative  text to images
• Convert a scanned PDF with Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

We will follow this post up with a more substantial article in the next couple of months, but let us know in the meantime what your thoughts are on the accessibility of PDFs.

After half an hour, the whole application was done. The only tricky part was when the form had an ambiguous question on “Did I want to apply for disability allowance?”  Contrary to my instincts, the right answer was “No” as I had already applied the previous year and disability allowance is for the full 3 years and doesn’t have to be reapplied for.  So, 9 out 10 for the people who designed that form, making it easier for people like me and, as a wider benefit, easier for everyone else as well.

Other than recruiting, we’re as busy as usual doing the usual range of usability, accessibility and design projects, as well as lots of training courses. We’ve also got a new advanced web writing training course starting later this month, so are just putting the finishing touches to this. This follows on from the launch of our other 2 new courses, SEO & PPC training this month.

We additionally published our annual ecommerce accessibility report, which as usual picked up plenty of press coverage and got lots of Twitter mentions. This year B&Q topped the charts with a record-high 84% - very impressive and well done to the web team over there. Every year we evaluate the website accessibility of 20 of the major UK high street retailers. Although there were some good improvements from the likes of B&Q,  the overall average slipped slightly which isn’t so encouraging.

Finally we got out and about a bit this month, with our marketing manager Jon presenting at the National Housing Federation Marketing Communications conference on how to engage audiences through social media (watch the video on our YouTube channel). I also presented at an SME ecommerce event at Wembley Stadium on how to increase conversion rates. I have to say, presenting with a view of the entire stadium is certainly impressive. The view - along with the fact that I was presenting with a microphone in my hand - made me rather tempted to break out into song as any rock star wouldn’t. Fortunately for the audience I didn’t.

1. Tag cloud gone wrong - The risks of automatically updating tag clouds with little or no moderation are apparent in this screenshot, where the EggExpert site’s most popular keywords revolve around their poor service
2. Web 2.0 video - An entertaining explanation of web 2.0 on YouTube

We’ll post some more gems in a month’s time. Future posts will go up on the last Friday of each month.

Photo credit: faith goble via Flickr/Creative Commons

1. Do your research
   Before you start using a social media site, find our if your target audiences are using it and how they’re using it. Based on this you can decide which channels are appropriate for your business.
2. Develop your own strategy
   What works for one company may not work for another so its important, based on your research, to work out how your company can best use these sites.
3. Focus on the long-term
   Social media isn’t a tool to get a short-term sales lift. You need to be patient and focus on building relationships and your brand.
4. Offer something interesting or useful
   This can be information and knowledge, exclusive discounts on products and services or even an alternative channel for queries and customer service.
5. Understand that the power is with the consumer
   Social media should not be treated as any other sales channel and the focus should be on interaction on the terms of the target audiences.  If it’s not on their terms, at best they’ll ignore you, at worst there will be a backlash.

If you’d like to see a recording of the full presentation which focuses on generic social media strategies for business as well as specifically on housing associations, it will be available on our YouTube channel later this afternoon.

Whereas the average score in usability has been increasing year-on-year, the average accessibility score actually went down slightly this year (although that may be partly because Woolworths was included again this year and only scored 38 per cent, but this time last year it wasn’t around to assess).

There were obvious exceptions to this lack of improvement however. B&Q was the outstanding mover and has clearly invested in its website since last year. It achieved a score of 84 per cent to top the table, up 16 per cent from last year. Other big improvements were seen with H.Samuel climbing from 8th place to 3rd, improving its score from 65 to 75, and Next which climbed from 18th to 11th with an improvement of 9% to 60.

In contrast, Marks & Spencer’s website, newly launched in October 2009, only managed to increase its accessibility score by 1 per cent to 59 per cent, even though it now leads the way in usability.

So, what’s the reason for the general lack of improvement in accessibility considering there’s continual investment in these ecommerce websites? Well this could be down to advances in web technologies making it more difficult for ecommerce sites to maintain levels of accessibility as they provide richer interactions.

It used to be the case that, if you did your usability and SEO work right, you’d be 80% there with accessibility due to the interlinked nature of the disciplines. However, AJAX and Web 2.0 present new challenges from an accessibility point of view and this is no longer the case.

However, some of these mistakes are so easy to rectify it’s amazing that so many sites fail every year. For example, the guideline that gets the lowest average every year is providing focus states for links to make them accessible for keyboard-only users. This can be done through one simple line of code, yet only B&Q, John Lewis, Argos and HMV do this to a reasonable level and the majority of sites don’t even attempt it.

SeeSaw has just launched its TV service bringing together recent and archive TV programmes from the BBC, Channel 4 and Five. It bought its technology from Project Kangaroo, which was joint venture by the same broadcasters that the Competition Commission blocked. Now that this service has finally arrived will it succeed?

3 channels in 1 place

Bringing programmes from different broadcasters into a single place has been popular elsewhere. Hulu did this in the USA where it offers programmes from NBC, Fox and ABC, amongst others, and has been very successful. For users it’s convenient to have all the programmes they want to watch all in one place and it encourages them to browse around and find various programmes, just as they do on their living room TVs. However, UK broadcasters already have their own successful catch up servies so SeeSaw will need promote itself heavily and attract users to its website.

SeeSaw will contain thousands of hours of archive programmes and this may help it to attract users. However, it’s not clear from its homepage that it contains a large amount of archive footage. It should make its proposition clear in its marketing material and on its homepage.

Living room

Most users will still prefer to watch programmes on their living room TVs rather than on their PC monitors. Living rooms are used for socialising and large TVs work much better PCs in this environment. If SeeSaw found a way to integrate its service into TV sets, set-top boxes or gaming consoles then it could get head of the competition. Netflix has does this quite successfully with its own streaming service in the USA and SeeSaw could benefit from doing something similar.