Make your platform accessible in just 4 steps
Sharing my journey to enhance accessibility at Fiverr: practical steps for product designers to make digital platforms more inclusive.
Imagine this situation: you head to the local grocery store to buy some vegetables. A prominent “Open” sign catches your eye, but there’s no apparent entrance. You look around for a door and spot a small hole in the wall. “Hello?” you ask through the hole. “Yes, please come in,” a friendly voice greets you, and you see a hand waving through the hole. Feeling a mix of curiosity and necessity, you decide to give it a shot and squeeze through, only to discover a store full of empty shelves. You ask if they have any vegetables, to which the owner nods and proudly points to the barren display. Confused, you stare at the empty shelves. You realize that you passed a perfectly functioning vending machine on your way. In fact, you’re not even that hungry, and without saying another word, you crawl back through the hole.
Is there a point to this bizarre story? What I’m trying to convey is that disability is not who you are, it’s what you experience. So, having a disability doesn’t necessarily mean that people lack the facilities or intentions to interact with your platform, it means that there are some factors that prevent them from doing it.
Our initial steps towards accessibility on our platform were well-intentioned but incomplete. We began by focusing on improving text size and link styling, which we later realized only addressed a small portion of the accessibility landscape. Are you committed to making this change, and do you want to be a hero for your organization? Great! Let’s begin.
1. Above all: Empathy.
Accessibility is something you rarely think about when you don’t have a disability. You need to take a closer look at people’s behavior when they interact with your product. Do they miss important information? Do they move closer to the computer screen or squint while reading the content? Can’t find a link, even though it’s right there (literally just hovered over it)? Recognizing these challenges can help you get to the root of the problem. So, just like with any other project you start working on, to understand the frustration of people with disabilities, you need to experience what they experience — feel their pain, if you will.
First and foremost, learn about different types of disabilities, and what are the biggest pain points for each disability type. Install chrome extensions that replicate vision impairments. We used the NoCoffee vision impairment simulator, but there are plenty of other options. Test screen readers on your platform, note the way it announces informative action icons, especially the ones that lack labels. Try navigating using only a keyboard. Even better, invite people with actual disabilities to use your platform. It’s a challenging journey, and, much like my own experience, you’lI probably encounter a lot of frustration and disappointment. Don’t be discouraged — this is part of the process. Now let’s see how you can help.
2. Raise awareness and collaborate.
So you’ve learned how content structure can impact people with intellectual disabilities, how people with motor impairments struggle with focus areas order and logic. How do you, a product designer, fix all that? It’s a long road, but you don’t have to be alone in this journey. Take small steps. Create a summary of your research and share it with brand and product designers, dev leads and UX writers. You don’t have to have all the answers, you will also learn from the process. Raise awareness and collaborate with other departments. Trust me, you will easily find like-minded people—inspire them to take ownership and lead accessibility in their field. Think of it as an inception, you need to place the idea in everyone’s head that accessibility is not a ‘nice to have’, it's a necessity.
3. Build and present your business case.
Accessibility is required by law, and while it might be difficult to estimate the market of potential customers, it’s easy to estimate probable lawsuit losses. There were approximately 2,387 lawsuits filed over digital accessibility in 2022 in the US alone¹. Test your website with the axe DevTools Chrome extension. Every issue it identifies is a potential lawsuit. According to 2021 ADA lawsuit statistics, settlements for most lawsuits targeting small and midsize businesses scale in the $5k-$20k range², and ADA lawsuit costs are way more than just the settlement, which already makes a compelling business case.
However, our main motivation for this initiative goes beyond legal considerations. At Fiverr we strive to create content that is localized, accessible, and diverse because for some individuals it means usable. Up to 1 out of 4 people in the US have some type of disability³, but 4 out of 4 require access. They are not an edge case, they are potential customers. This is what inclusive design is. If you want to support your community, it’s important to consider the needs of all people.
4. Educate and prioritize.
Maybe they gave you a green light, maybe you now have a team of people dedicated to incorporating accessibility into your platform. Maybe not—don’t stop there. It is most efficient and effective to incorporate accessibility from the very beginning of projects, so you don’t need to go back and re-do work. But at this point, the first thing to do is to educate designers, developers and UX and SEO writers on how to create accessible content. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, all the necessary information is out there on the web.
Create guidelines and present them to your peer designers. Create a digital accessibility checklist. Show examples of best practices and a proper way to handle different use cases. Add it to the onboarding process for new employees. Go over your design system, and see where you can make improvements: maybe you can tweak the library colors to pass WCAG standards? It might help to engage brand designers to assist you with that. We updated 4 colors in our palette, the change was barely noticeable and it wasn’t too much effort, but it made a huge difference for accessibility.
Don’t have a design system? What a great time to start! Reusing library components doesn’t only save time for designers and developers, but also promotes consistency. We all know that a consistent look and behavior helps build strong and trusting relationships between your platform and the people who use it. Not to mention how much easier it is to make updates in one place, rather than go from project to project fixing the same issues over and over again.
In conclusion.
It might seem that we have it all covered, and we’re definitely getting there. We still work hard to educate, promote and make accessibility a company priority. Taking ownership over a domain that has so many nuances and different angles is challenging, but also very satisfying. Accessibility will open a new world of opportunities and drive innovation in your company. Did you know that SMS texting was invented as a way for deaf people to communicate with one another? Voice assistant was designed to help people with motor impairments. Self-driving cars were created for people with blindness and automatic doors to assist people in a wheelchair. All of these inventions are now universal and make our lives easier every day. Having people with disabilities in mind will improve the user experience for everyone, and empower our community as a whole.
¹ Complete Report 2022 Website Accessibility Lawsuit Recap
https://www.accessibility.com/complete-report-2022-website-accessibility-lawsuits
² 2021 Digital / Website ADA Lawsuit Statistics Show Continued Rise
https://www.accessibility.works/blog/digital-website-ada-cases-lawsuit-statistics-2021/
³ Centers for disease control and prevention: Disability Impacts All of Us
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/infographic-disability-impacts-all.html
