I’ve been invited to write a short article (max. 4 page) for a Slovenian digital inclusion conference called DIGIN 2023 (opens in new window). I called it “General Strategies for Improving Accessibility of E-commerce“. I asked my colleague, Tilen ล kraba from Institute for digital accessibility A11y.si (Slovenian, opens in new window) to help me with reviews and feedback. After we established consensus I had to get peer review and I had to made some corrections. Article was accepted and I am going to present it next week (11th October 2023). This was first time for me and I decided to reflect on some reflections about the experience in this post.
Writing for my blog is often very easy as I don’t have any peer reviews and I just convert my ideas to posts. It’s like offloading memories, reflections, ideas and general thoughts on accessibility and beyond. Blog posts are not targeted and with that way simpler as well.
It’s totally something else when writing a real, academic, article. My main idea for the article was to contribute to awareness and collect some generalized accessibility problems in e-commerce and in online banking. I also wanted to briefly add potential solutions and best practices, as it’s easy to point out problems but not so easy to come with suggestions. I always try to think about user experiences, so I divided problems with their solutions based on generalized customer journeys.
It seems that the limitation of maximum 4 pages had most impact on the whole article. It forced me to be very very very short and write very wide and shallow. One of peer reviewers actually commented on that and I agree, but I wanted to really expose ideas and provide references for further investigations. Like a general plan.
We must not forget that article needs introduction and all references need to be listed as well. I wanted to promote best practices from accessibility professionals I trust and also add some relevant academic articles. I dropped the online banking part as user journey was actually so general that it can be applied to all e-commerce user flows, so the final article didn’t go into banking but discussed e-commerce in general.
This was a good experience and short form made me think that I should maybe concentrate on a single part of a user journey next time as it’s impossible to go into depths when you have so little space or time.
Peer review was extremely valuable and I love the feedback it provided. It was anonymous and I like that. I could also differentiate between different levels of accessibility knowledge when reading the feedback. That was also interesting for me.
When I will write a new article like that I will prepare much more detailed information and will not try to cover whole user journeys to keep it short. It’s perhaps a good thing to be limited in such ways, so that one can focus on the details. Tips for next article:
- Need to read more academic articles on accessibility (unfortunately some of the best ones need expensive membership and that is a barrier in itself).
- Need to involve people with disabilities, getting their valuable feedback on a subject is extremely important (need to have a good network otherwise it’s probably not so valuable in terms of relevance in statistics).
- Good to have multiple co-authors to help with different aspects, especially people from academia that have more experience in providing best results.
Writing itself was easy for me, I guess I could write a short book on the subject. But page limit, formatting and fine tuning references and content to stay inside limitations was the worst part for me. No surprises there as I had close to zero experiences.
Once again, I hope my article will help some stakeholders to understand the problems with their e-commerce that people with disabilities might have and to be able to do their own research, or to delegate responsibilities better.
Update 15th of October 2023 – I will be able to publish the article on my blog after it will be officially published and receive bibliographic/catalogue database number.
