Building accessibility research practices
Still user research, just more inclusive.
As someone focused on accessibility research, I believe that inclusive and accessible design has some of the most interesting and creative challenges to be solved. At Booking.com, we are learning from disabled people about their travel needs, so that we can make it easier for everyone to experience the world.
To achieve this mission we have a dedicated Accessibility Team made up of 12 people with roles spanning UX, engineering and product. Our team enables other product teams to comply with the international accessibility legal guidelines, and to go beyond this to create accessible and inclusive experiences.
Inclusive design
Inclusive design is the process of making products that are usable by everyone, regardless of age, ability and circumstance. Accessibility is one topic that sits under the umbrella of inclusive design; ensuring that the things we design are accessible to people regardless of disability. It’s about building a door that can be opened by anyone and lets everyone in.
In UX, we pride ourselves on being user-centred: we build around user needs. But, which users and what needs are we actually prioritising? According to the World Health Organisation, one billion people around the world live with some form of disability, making up around 15% of the global population.
Despite this large population, disabled users do not tend to make it into mainstream research, and this means that their needs are not being considered. At Booking.com we are in a big cultural shift to change this. Accessibility is UX, and our research should be as diverse as the populations that make up the Earth we travel.
Accessibility research
Accessibility research is just user research that is inclusive of disabled people and is designed with their needs in mind. This includes participants with permanent, temporary or situational impairments and disabilities. We have created a travel adaptation of Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit inspired by the UK Ministry of Justice’s version where they added their specific context:
Assistive technology includes products or systems that support individuals with disabilities, restricted mobility or other impairments to perform functions. One example of this is a ‘sip and puff device’ which is an alternative to a mouse used to command digital devices, e.g. blowing air to activate the space bar.
We run automated and manual testing to understand if our products work with different technologies and are compliant with accessibility guidelines. User research with real users of assistive devices explores if the flow of an experience matches expectations.
The value of both of these methods is summarised in the wonderful quote by accessibility leader David Dame:
We went through a few stages before arriving at our current research processes today, this involved starting somewhere small.
How did we start building research practices?
1. Connecting over a mutual interest in the topic
We started a small task force of 13 interested people from our Research Community called ‘Accessibility + Research’. We documented what research had taken place to date, where the gaps lay and what we could start to do to address them.
In our recent past, we were not conducting accessibility research regularly. A few projects with disabled participants had taken place, but these did not sit within a wider research strategy.
We began further exploration by kicking off an ‘A11y Series’ of talks to learn from experts across the industry including Jerry Robinson — UX Researcher at Google, Mandeep Chahal — UX Researcher at Google, Milly Frances Foot — Freelance Researcher, Charley Pothecary — Service Designer & Founder of Inclusively, and James Roscow — Market and Audience Insight Lead at Scope. Thanks to our fantastic speakers, we were able to embed some of our learning at Booking, including:
- Design inclusively from the start. Oftentimes teams only start thinking about accessibility near the end of a product life cycle. Prioritising accessibility from the start can really improve your product.
- Recognise that accessibility research is still user research, but just more inclusive. We should build for flexibility in timings and methods of collecting feedback. Let participants decide what is most comfortable for them, eg. written responses or recording a video.
- Do research little and often. By doing small tests from the beginning of a design product we can prevent needing to make a lot of changes later.
- Be supportive throughout the research journey. Create a safe and non-judgemental space for respondents to feel comfortable to share their thoughts. This applies both for online and live research.
2. Starting to run accessibility-focused projects ‘on the side’ of other topics
Putting these learnings into practice, we kick-started accessibility research with our product teams alongside new product development. One example was the Google Mobile Lab we ran with CX Partners, which explored how we could improve the accommodation booking journey of the Booking.com app for users who have visual impairments. We found there were significant barriers for users when trying to pick a date in the calendar.
With the goal of further understanding the issues, we expanded our research to include other assistive technologies including voice software and screen magnification. We deep-dived into further calendar studies and the main barriers were around calendar navigation. Participants had to tab through individual dates as month-to-month navigation was not possible. This was an inefficient and frustrating process.
A new pattern has been designed with the addition of month headers to enable month-to-month navigation. We implemented this for our accommodation flow to make picking a date easier. These projects were the beginning of our digital accessibility research and, as a company, we could try out approaches which we have since baked into our research framework.
3. Having a dedicated accessibility researcher to run projects with the team & support other researchers’ projects
One year after we started the task force, I became the first dedicated researcher to work on accessibility research, as part of the Accessibility Team. My role is twofold, to conduct research to develop our accessibility strategy and to train and support other researchers to scale inclusive research practices.
This research spans three areas:
- Digital accessibility: Can a broad range of users and their technologies access and use our digital components and patterns?
- Accessible UX: Are end-to-end flows providing accessible user experiences?
- Inclusive service design: Have we met the needs of all of our users across our service design, both on our platform and whilst travelling?
Our team has broader collaborations taking place across research departments. For example, a diary study to understand how travellers with mobility impairments plan, book and take trips.
Together with researchers Jenni Harrington and Stefanos Papalamprou, we explored how people search for accessible destinations, book a big enough car to transport necessary equipment and find a holiday home that can accommodate multiple disabled people.
Where we want to go from here
There is always room to grow and mature in research, and we are still on a journey at Booking to mature accessibility research. To do this we plan to:
- Incorporate inclusive sampling into all research projects
- Regularly run accessibility-specific projects, as well as non-accessibility-focused projects with disabled participants.
- Conduct more cross-departmental collaborations with a focus to inform our inclusive vision work.
- Build an assistive technology testing space in our Research Labs in Amsterdam. This will accommodate teams to run manual on-device testing for accessibility. This of course goes hand-in-hand with user research and would not be a replacement for learning from people who use assistive technologies in their daily lives.
Where you can begin
Accessibility may be a new area for you and knowing where to start might feel a little daunting. There is no right or wrong place to begin. In your mind, compare the difference between starting small on one area of accessibility, versus doing nothing at all. By starting off small with your first pilot area, you will gather learnings and knowledge to take that across to all other areas of accessibility.
As a researcher…
- Start your first accessible research project today. Recruit disabled people in your research. Exclusion will happen unless we learn from the experts.
- Connect with our friends at Fable — an accessibility research platform which has a panel segmented by the assistive technologies they use. You can recruit, conduct and incentivise participants through their accessible platform.
For any role…
- Grow your knowledge on accessibility. The Microsoft Inclusive 101 Guidebook is a fantastic place to start.
- Advocate for accessibility in your daily work as early into the product development journey as possible.
We are optimistic that in the future, accessibility will be a highly appreciated and integrated part of UX. Researchers, designers, writers, engineers and product leaders will come together to put accessibility into the heart of their work. What can you do today to start this process in your organisation?
Special thanks to Fedora Devena, Beth Thomas, Graham Cookson, Jaime Walke and Ian Swinton for all of their support in creating this blog post.
