When I set out to research these various methods of stimulations that you provided us, the difference between the three gave me a better idea of what I want and do not want to do when building my websites.
My experience with the Screen Reader Simulation was horrible. Not being able to use my mouse was a huge hindrance to my navigating the website. I literally sat there messing with it for about a half-hour before giving up. The second Simulation Low Vision Simulation was very enlightening. I never really thought about how the use of bitmap text versus real text would affect people with vision problems. The third and final simulation was the Distractibility Simulation. This was another site that I had a bit of difficulty with and had to make sure that I was paying more attention to what I needed to do rather than try and catch the bombs. That is a site that if you had ADHD you would never be able to navigate through it.
After evaluating the three different simulations I understand more the term of universal usability. By seeing the various low vision simulations that provided us with the various types of vision disabilities I know now that I must take every end user in mind when creating a site. As a person that does not have any major vision problems, I never realized the huge impact that each of the things demonstrated. The end user of the site must be able to fully navigate throughout the site without difficulty or they will be a one stop to your site wonder. To expand on my opinion of the Screen Reader Simulation further, this simulation was so completely frustrating that by the time I left the site that I vowed I would never ever go back to any site like that again. The monotone computer simulated voice was simply too much for me. It reminded me of the 1980’s movie War Games. I turned my volume down at one point and had the caption on, but still could not figure out how to navigate very well through the site. When given shortcut keyboard commands and the loss of use of my mouse, I was reminded how dependent that I had become on using it for navigation. I determined that without the use of my mouse to navigate around I was severely handicapped with my navigation through the site. At one point I even had 2 other regular computer users in my home try to navigate through the site and neither of them could complete it as well. That site was a complete reminder of the 1980’s when all programs were dos based. I grew up in a computer based household and had a Father that was a computer programmer in the era. In the end I will have to say that my end opinion would be that this was a very non user friendly way to navigate through a site.
The Distractibility Simulation for me was