Next Tech’s Commitment to Accessibility
Our mission at Next Tech is to make technology education accessible for everyone. While this has always been our goal, it was not something our product truly delivered on until recently, when we made an enormous investment into improving the accessibility of our product for users with disabilities. In this post we talk about the challenges we faced improving the accessibility of our web-based development interface, including specific techniques that we hope will be useful for others striving to do the same. We also discuss how this commitment to product accessibility naturally extends throughout our company and the positive impact that stemmed from this.
Let us start with a brief story. Starting in 2019, we increasingly heard the word “accessibility” from our customers. It quickly became clear that ensuring products were accessible for users with disabilities was something that students, instructors, and education institutions alike were thinking about more than ever. Seemingly all at once, education companies around the world heard the calls for increased accessibility and began to respond.
Next Tech did the same. Over the last half of 2019 and the start of 2020, we have launched an engineering initiative dedicated to addressing the problems faced by users with disabilities who are learning to code. After thoroughly researching the challenges presented by web-based products, we educated ourselves on the practical solutions to these problems. At the highest level, the goal of making accessible software is to ensure that it is perceivable, operable, and understandable by all. There are many considerations and methods that make this possible, but the most important thing is to start. Providing an accessible product requires ongoing investment, so the sooner you can begin releasing improvements, the better.
Our first steps were to assess the visual choices we had made in the past. We identified and fixed several issues throughout our product to make it easier to use for those with limited vision, for example, making colors easier to see by improving their contrast and increasing font sizes that were too small. This, like many accessibility improvements, benefits all of our users — even those without disabilities — by making the product easier for everyone to see.
After making some of those visual changes, we tackled keyboard usability. This is something critical for people who are visually impaired, as well as people with limited dexterity that leaves them unable to use a mouse or similar pointing device. It is also something that many advanced users, such as software developers, expect from a software development interface.
This is where we faced our biggest challenge. Because our product contains a full-featured code editor, we needed to ensure users could use their keyboard’s Tab key to navigate through our interface when needed while still being able to use Tab when writing code in the editor. After much internal discussion, we found a solution. By “wrapping” the code editor in an overlay with a message that informs anyone using a keyboard that they can “enter” and “exit” the component using a certain key combination. Once they have “entered” the editor they are able to type and use the keyboard as they would in a standalone application. Once finished they can use an “exit” key combination to resume navigating the page as before. We have found this solution to provide a seamless experience without affecting those using a mouse or similar input.
Another major challenge we faced was updating our product to be more usable with screen readers. Screen readers allow a visually impaired user to interact with modern applications by reading out the current state of an application or website and enabling them to interact with it accordingly. This is a challenge that the screen reader handles, but to function effectively it depends on the website being programmed in a specific way. The screen reader can expose the structure and state of an application to the user, but only if the website’s code is assembled correctly. This means that visual information (e.g., something that looks like a button or a footer) is not useful to screen readers. The button and footer must be explicitly labeled so the screen reader can convey that information to the user in a useful way. This also includes the state of an application, such as a menu being open or closed or a toggle being on or off.
Making these changes was quite a daunting task. Historically, much of our application was designed around making it “look right”, leaving a lot of room for ambiguous design choices. Since screen readers cannot handle ambiguity, we had to put some serious thought into some elements of our website. Understanding the expected interaction, what information needs to be conveyed, and how the application should respond were all factors behind our decisions. The strict requirements to ensure screen reader support has required us to be more deliberate in how we develop new user experiences, resulting in dozens of changes that make the product more consistent and usable for everyone.
We are thrilled with the improvements we have made to the accessibility of our product. But completing them resulted in an unexpected yet positive change: it helped us grow as a company. We have changed our mission statement to “making technology education accessible for everyone” to explicitly encompass our new focus on accessibility in all forms. Accessibility as an idea quickly spread to all levels of the company and became a lens through which we now view every new product, content, and growth initiatives.
As education continues to move online — an initiative that started years ago and has now been accelerated by COVID-19 — accessibility has become excruciatingly important. Where an instructor could previously help a student in person, there is now only a ZOOM call that presents nearly insurmountable challenges. Now, more than ever, making education products accessible is a challenge well worth the effort. We look forward to continuing to work with our customers in the years to come to ensure our product continues to make technology education accessible for everyone.
We have come a long way, but this is still the start of a journey for us. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter to stay in touch as we continue to work on making our product and technology education accessible for everyone.
A VPAT is available upon request. Please email hello@next.tech.
