Xerox stars for accessibility

I was working for Xerox when the Xerox Star, precursor to all the computer systems in use today, was introduced. Before then, computer users just had command-line or character-based GUIs. The Xerox Star workstations were displayed for the first time for us insiders in a special room, like a secular chapel, guarded over by the priesthood of developers. We were amazed. Many of the ideas had been around, but never combined into a complete graphical system. What were we amazed by? The Graphics? No. The proportional fonts? No. For common usage, this was, at the time, in the science-fiction realm of affordability. It was the accessibility that amazed us.

In the narrowest sense, the windowing system that Palo Alto designed allowed people with disabilities such as poor sight, hearing or motor control to have comparable opportunities to access computing resources. Applications could be configured to provide alternative ways of using their features with different visual clues, without mouse or bypassing the keyboard. Each application had the same style, layout, and menu system, so that you had a good chance of finding yourself around an application well enough to start using it, even the very first time you tried. Folks with perceptual access deficits fared well because any icons were used only in addition to the menus and had accompanying text or ‘mouse-overs’. There were rules for background and foreground colours, text size and do on. A huge amount of work went on in the ensuing years into finding the optimal rules to make the user interface accessible to people of any language, culture, age, or disability.

For many years everyone mostly stuck to the rules. I’ve developed applications that were designed to comply with a corporate usability manual and had to be signed off by teams of usability experts, user representatives and even the unions, and very right too. They were to be used by people for their entire working day, for maybe years and there was a huge productivity payoff for getting everything right. We used ‘usability testing’ where people unfamiliar with our system were asked to perform simple tasks whilst we, in another room behind a two-way mirror, groaned at our simple design mistakes.

Now, pretty much anything goes. I recently came across a black search box with a black background, for example; Microsoft ditched the Xerox Star menu system for its office products in favour of the ‘office ribbon’; Those who stick to the rules for accessibility are made to seem staid, dull and old-fashioned. The rule-breakers look cool and also lock their users in because of the learning required for change. Maybe it is time to fight back.

 

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