What’s the big deal with UX accessibility?
Have you ever noticed how UX designers ensure their products are accessible to all users of all abilities?
If you’ve been on Tiktok in recent months, you may have noticed that Closed Captions went from appearing in a scattered handful of videos to an automatic feature you can find in just about every new video. Or perhaps you’ve utilised the text-to-speech function on your smartphone and texted someone with a “Hey Siri” or an “Ok Google” while your hands were full. Such features are part of a larger movement of innovation in UX (user experience) design that seeks to create a better experience for a greater variety of users. In other words, ensuring accessibility.
Accessibility in design, sometimes referred to as a11y, enables users of diverse abilities to navigate, understand, and use products. It’s not just about designing for those with disabilities, but rather about designing products to be usable for anyone in any situation. For instance, ensuring good contrast on a user interface can not only help someone with visual impairments navigate the product better, but it can also help someone facing temporary difficulties, like when the user is standing in a bright room. It’s part of the UX designer’s job to make products that end users can easily use and enjoy, therefore accessibility is an integral part of allowing products to reach a larger audience.
So how do designers improve accessibility? The potential difficulties that users may face are grouped into four large categories — auditory, visual, motor and cognitive. Each of these categories has features designed to overcome them. For instance, assistive technology like screen readers are targeted at people with visual difficulties, while voice assistants target those with motor difficulties. These things may go unnoticed by most of us, but they can be found in a majority of products that we use daily. Take a look at the settings page of your device and you’ll likely find a long list of features that can be enabled to provide a smoother user experience (like these features for Apple products), and the next time you see an image in an article, notice the image captions that can be used by screen readers screenreaders.
According to the World Health Organisation, over 1 billion people in the world experience some kind of disability — that is, 15% of the world’s population and hence 15% of end-users. This statistic makes it all the more necessary for designers to take into consideration the needs of such a large group of users.
While there are various features that help make existing products more accessible, there will always be more work to be done. Even as features seek to be inclusive to all users of all abilities, they may still end up being skewed to better serve certain groups. For example, research has shown that Google’s speech recognition feature is 13% more accurate for men than it is for women, and YouTube’s Closed Captions feature still experiences a strong racial and gender bias in its accuracy.
Even then, continuous progress is being made to address such issues and to make products more usable for all, such as Apple’s upcoming software features that include the introduction of AssistiveTouch to Apple Watches.
Personally, I look forward to seeing the launch of new and innovative accessibility features and seeing society progress towards greater accessibility for all.
Read more about how some organisations incorporate accessibility into their products:
- Singapore Government: www.designsystem.tech.gov.sg
- Apple: www.apple.com/sg
- Microsoft: www.microsoft.com
- Google: www.google.com
- Instagram: about.instagram.com
CareerContact is an ed-tech platform designed to bridge the gap between school and work. We help students develop digital skills and connect them with SMEs in Southeast Asia. Whether you’re a student, educator or enterprise, feel free to reach out to us at info@careercontact.org or join us at CareerContact.app.
Stay up to date through our Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook or Twitter.
