Go Hack Yourself
We all experience accessibility challenges as a natural part of our lives, and our ability to access is often affected by our current circumstance. This will also change during our lifetime due to sickness, injury and the natural part of our ageing process.
Because our abilities change, we should be more flexible and avoid focusing our design efforts on the model of a standard issue person. That way our designs can fit better into the way we all live day to day.
When we design and consider disability, it is to do with both the variety of humans we have in society, and understanding how the design of products, services and environments can disable us.
“Impairment + Environment = Disability. As designers we disable people when we don’t get it right”
Jamie Knight — @JamieKnight
Supporting access is often achieved through designing and building for user control (eg. supporting pinch zoom, voice input etc. on mobile apps) and ensuring that design works in different sensory modes. So if you can’t hear it you can see it, and if you can’t see it you can hear it etc.
People can think that designing accessible products is about being compliant to guidelines, for example WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). However it is really about considering a diverse approach to human centred design, and ensuring that what we make is inclusive for everyone.
Accessibility in design is also about recognising that we all have challenges and different coping strategies. It is important that we first understand these human strategies and then create products that can adapt to them.
“Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design”
Dieter Rams
To do this we need to identify what challenges we all experience, and under what circumstances we experience them.
Before considering the challenges, first think about how assistive technology is now mainstream. Try and use these everyday technologies which are part of the operating systems in devices and match them to the challenges we face. These technologies include support for closed captioning (subtitles), Siri/Cortana/Voice Control, pinch zoom etc. Design solutions can also be solved with new emergent design ideas, such as conversational user interfaces that combine assistive technologies; Text To Speech and Speech To Text with rudimentary Artificial Intelligence.
These technologies however are not the only part of the solution. The technical delivery of accessibility is compromised when specific human challenges and situations are not supported in the UX. As a designer, this is where it can be useful to hack yourself to build empathy, and find out the right questions before you embark on more in-depth user research.
To be effective, this self-hacking is an early stage of the design process, and should be used to explore earliest paper and electronic prototypes. When you build your prototypes and hack yourself or your subjects, you can think about the 4 following challenges:
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1. Cognitive Accessibility -
We all experience cognitive challenge, and it happens when we’re not able to wholly focus on a specific task. To experience this first hand, try using your prototype after staying up very late or when you’ve just woken-up. You can use it whilst watching TV or holding a conversation. You could even test the product or service after a few drinks or a night out (such as booking a taxi, posting photos, or ordering a takeaway.)
All of these approaches to testing will begin to show how comprehensible a design is, and how focused you need to be in order to use the prototype.
Remember to tape everything. Note taking can be tricky when you’re tired and/or have had a couple of drinks.
2. Motor Accessibility -
We all experience motor challenge, and interfaces should support different physical challenges. A good example would be ensuring that a mobile app works if you only have one hand. It could be a temporary mobility issue (you could be carrying your shopping or holding your baby) but these mobility challenges are real to all of us.
To emulate a physical challenge whilst testing your prototypes, you could tape your fingers together or use the prototypes when very cold. Try using the device one-handed whilst holding a bag of sugar in the other. You could test it whilst standing on a crowded, moving bus and being shaken around. These simple methods to test the UX could help you find the problems in a prototype.
Now that voice control is becoming mainstream, consider from Day 1 how your product can be controlled using only your voice.
3. Vision Accessibility -
We all have times when our sight is affected. We’ve lost our glasses, we’re outside and the sun is too bright, we had one too many drinks, or our phone’s battery save mode has turned the screen brightness down.
There are lots of ways we can approach these challenges. Something simple for designers who wear glasses, try not wearing them, and if you don’t need glasses, wear someone else’s. You can also emulate different eye conditions. This can be done with coloured acetates, tape, dry markers etc on your own glasses. But if you don’t fancy that, you can buy eye condition emulation glasses such as VisualEyes from Lighthouse International.
You could even half close your eyes whilst the lights are on, and the screen brightness is low. Is the prototype’s contrast high enough to support it? If not, you are going to limit access for a majority of your users.
4. Hearing Accessibility -
Our ability to hear can be compromised. The world is noisy, and sometimes we cannot hear because the environment drowns out the sound. Either that, or you’re in a library or open plan office where noise isn’t permitted.
If the app is a game or the UX is enhanced with sound, then use it whilst wearing ear plugs or with the sound switched off. Use the app whilst watching TV or listening to music. Do you miss anything?
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To make things even more interesting, combine some of the accessibility challenges above (eg. Using the interface whilst walking along a busy street.) There you have cognitive challenge as you are multitasking, physical challenge as you are moving, and sensory challenges from the environment.
None of the above replaces testing with real users, but it will ensure that your ongoing design and prototyping process will have more flexibility to accommodate different users’ needs. So when you do finally test with people in situations that disable them, you will get more useful insights from that exercise.
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/mollyfordwilliams
Twitter: @mollymayfw
If you fancy a chat about this post then email us hello@aplaything.com or check out our website www.aplaything.com
More to look at:
Bigger companies are also tackling human centred design more, allowing them to empathise with a greater portion of the audience that want to use the design/product. One example of this is Facebook’s 2G Tuesdays. Facebook employees can use an app that simulates a 2G connection that millions of users around the globe have available. This connection is much slower, and this process allows the employees to have a greater understanding on what they should do in order to improve the site’s inclusivity. (The Verge: http://bit.ly/1MsvMk8)
Primadonna asked their male employees to wear E-Cup breast weights for a day so they know how it really feels. (AdWeek: http://bit.ly/29DJXaa)
