Develop an accessibility-first design process

By building for every potential use case, the experience is improved for all users. This means designers should always be building accessible websites and including people with disabilities as part of their personas. Doing so expands the reach of the product for your business, and keeps teams moving quickly by preventing any need to return and update legacy designs. (If you need an example, check out the story behind the famous OXO peeler). Doing it early will save you and your team time, money, and effort in the long run. It can be difficult to know how to build accessibility into your process, rather than just addressing it right before implementation (or right before you get sued). So how can accessibility be more accessible?

Adding accessibility to your mental design checklist

To design accessibly, accessibility needs to be a first thought rather than a last. It should be right up there with error states, empty states, edge cases, and all the other considerations when developing designs. Remember that there is no set rulebook for accessibility as you are building this mindset. There are great guides and checklists you can utilize as a starting point, but there will always be unique scenarios to adapt for. Think of accessibility in terms of users rather than items: could someone with visual impairments use this design? How about a keyboard user with limited motion? Or less technically savvy people? The end goal is for your product to be perceivable, operable, usable, and robust (POUR) for all users.

Accessibility is also not just for extreme outliers. Do not fall into the trap of thinking of accessibility as only designing for screen readers. People with visual impairments are not the only ones who might have trouble navigating an app or website. Consider older users who might have limited vision and mobility. Or users with partial blindness, that don’t need a screen reader but can only visualize parts of a screen at a time. Or those with temporary disabilities, such as someone with a broken arm that now needs to tap through small app icons with their non-dominant hand. Accessibility is a spectrum that changes and evolves for every individual over time, and you should design for everyone because no one deserves to be excluded.

That spectrum includes challenges beyond the physical. Accessibility means also accounting for everyone’s mental needs. Some good examples to consider here are choosing fonts that work well for readers with dyslexia, and formatting your page hierarchy in a way that’s easy to focus on for people with ADHD. Animations are great but can be overwhelming for people with autism; be sure to have a way users can stop or pause moving elements. Mental needs exist on a spectrum as well; design for everyone from neurodiverse users to those with migraines or even those suffering from temporary sleep deprivation.

Last but not least, always remember additional mobile accommodations. Mobile devices are not only smaller, but they are also used in a much wider variety of environments and situations compared to desktop. This means you should account for higher levels of distractions and higher levels of accommodations. Big touch targets, high contrast, subtitled audio, etc. are all even more important on mobile.

While these are not comprehensive examples, they can hopefully serve as good kickstarters into your accessible design journey.

Convincing your company you need to be accessible

Utilize empathy (backed by some statistics, such as the fact that nearly 1 in 5 Americans have a registered disability) to get accessibility buy-in across your company. Take real world examples of your users and share them with your team and stakeholders. Make sure you are including users with disabilities in your user research efforts. Show your team the challenges people might encounter by walking through your ideal user journey with different limitations. Creating a user-first mindset across the organization will prevent accessibility from being a continual uphill battle and create a culture of advocating for positive user experiences.

If empathy fails, another tool in your belt of building accessibility at your organization is legal compliance. According to ADA guidelines, any person or organization must make their website (information) readily accessible and usable by individuals with disabilities if it is for use by the public. In other words, everyone that can access your product should be able to use your product. To meet requirements, the ADA suggests following the Section 508 Standards and WCAG (level AA).

If empathy and compliance cannot get you buy-in, here are some follow-ups to remind colleagues of the value accessibility can bring to the business:

• Accessible websites can rank higher with SEO
  → Accessibility tagging makes it easier for search crawlers to find info
  → Accessible websites have higher visitor rates due to not ostracizing any user subsets with disabilities
  → Accessible websites are more likely to be shared out by users
• Accessible websites are easier to navigate and interact with
  →Accessibility increases the usability of the site for all (especially the aging population who are disproportionately affected by a range of disabilities)
• Ensuring accessibility up front can decrease potential bug fixing time in the future
  → At minimum, investing now means you don’t have to re-do code when legal compliance comes around to bite you!
• Meeting accessibility requirements opens up opportunities for contracts with other companies that require compliance of their partners

Accessibility does take more effort and thinking to implement. But by doing it early — and doing it right — you and your team save much more time and effort down the line. And building a better, more thoughtful product will lead to more opportunity and more success for your business.

Implementation

Once you have buy-in and you’ve created accessible designs, they need to get built and shipped off to actual users. The key here is to remember that accessibility is a whole team effort. Your developers are the ones creating your designs and making sure all the specs match. They are also the ones who will ensure that ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) tagging is up to date, alt text is present, visual actions are labeled, and everything can be tabbed through on a keyboard. Your product managers are the ones who are reinforcing accessibility requirements for implementation and ensuring nothing ships without compliance. Have conversations with everyone early and often to ensure feasibility and make sure there will not be any “gotchas.”

Creating a product is a team activity. Make sure the whole team — developers, product managers, high-level stakeholders, marketing, etc. — are a part of the process and understand all the efforts needed to create an accessible product.

Planning for the future of accessibility

For all the potential risks around artificial intelligence (AI), what is most exciting about how this technology is evolving is that it will expand the opportunity for truly custom user experiences. At its best, AI will allow for creation of not just accessible websites, but adaptive ones that can accomodate every individual’s needs. Be prepared as a designer to rise to the challenge, and make sure your product has been built to leave room for growth and scaling.

Conclusion

Accessibility is a foundational element of good design and building a successful product. Companies should always aim to build quality products and experiences for users across every spectrum, and I hope that the advice shared here has equipped you to go out and be an accessibility advocate. If you have any questions, or would like to know more about my experiences and expertise, please reach out! And if you and your team could use some assistance building out accessibility at your org, check out my company Crafted and our consulting services.