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Stop Sweeping Your To-do’s Under The Carpet!

12 tips to make your product more accessible

Published in

REWRITE TECH by diconium

6 min readJun 23, 2022

Accessibility isn’t a dirty word. This is something many need to unlearn. It is something inclusive, meaningful, and conscientious. Creating work with accessibility in mind is being equitable. Many designers neglect to think about how what they create has an effect on many. I have been guilty of this. I have been working on improving my skills, unlearning what I knew, deconstructing and rebuilding my beliefs, and speaking up to others about the subject.

The word accessibility shouldn’t turn into a cliché either, or a hype word, for that matter. It is part of usability and focuses on those who have a disability. Many accessibility requirements improve usability for everyone, especially in limiting situations. It means moving away from universal design toward inclusive design. Which makes it user-friendly for people with disabilities. Poor design could lead to discrimination. Disabilities include permanent, situational, and temporary.

“Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can equally perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with websites and tools. It also means that they can contribute equally without barriers.” — W3C

Here are 12 tips to help to make your product more accessible. They are in no particular order, as they are all important and useful:

1. Have an accessible UX Design process.

The topic of accessibility should be integrated into the UX Process. You can do this by including people with disabilities within your research, personas, and by running various tests.

…when teams “approach accessibility as a checklist to meet [the WCAG] standards, the focus is only on the technical aspects of accessibility. As a result, the human interaction aspect is often lost, and accessibility is not achieved. Combining accessibility standards and usability processes with real people ensures that web design is technically and functionally usable by people with disabilities. This is referred to as ‘usable accessibility’ or ‘accessible user experience (UX)’.” – WAI

2. Involve users with disabilities

You can do this by observing users with disabilities on how they use products. By adding them to your research. Involve them as soon as possible and people with various disabilities. Reach out to disability organizations, universities, and elderly clubs if you need help building relationships.

3. Deconstruct and relearn what you know

Organizations should have in place an accessibility policy and strategy that support the procurement of accessible authoring and evaluation tools, training and so on. Most people don’t know that designing accessible interfaces is a must-do and not an optional add-on. It benefits users without disabilities, too. The more accessible a product is, the more usable it is for everyone.

If you are interested in re-learning and critical thinking, a designer’s critical alphabet is a great way to start.

4. Run Tests

You can do several types of tests throughout your process. Only using a combination of accessibility evaluation tools and manual testing can tell you how accessible and compliant your product is. Tests you can include within your process are manual testing, expert testing, usability testing, and automated testing.

5. Design Aesthetic

Embracing Accessibility can open innovation. You can design beautiful interfaces that are accessible. Accessibility has nothing to do with how attractive or interesting a product is. It is possible to create a beautiful, media-rich, interactive, engaging and accessible website. The trick is to make accessible design work well for those who need it and be invisible for those that don’t.

“Accessibility will not force you to build a product that is ugly, boring, or cluttered. It will give you design constraints that will lead to better products for all of your users” — Jesse Hausler Principal Accessibility Specialist at Salesforce.

6. Colours

Check colours as you are designing, not when you are done. Aim to exceed (or meet) the minimum colour contrast requirements. Try to avoid problematic combinations such as:

Red & Green (the biggest ones to avoid)
Green & Brown
Green & Blue
Green & Gray
Green & Black
Blue & Gray
Blue & Purple

7. Use of language

Plain language benefits all users, including people with cognitive disabilities, low reading literacy, and people who are encountering an unknown topic or language. You can help by
Avoid ambiguous words for action triggers — some people rely only on hearing. As well, don’t use complicated language or avoid slang and as some people don’t get nuances, try to use familiar language. You can also provide clear instructions. Finally, put information in a logical order, with the important details first.

8. User-Centric Design

Keep in mind this: people first. Accessibility is about equal access to information for all people. Digital accessibility is not a “nice to have” but a “must-have” since it’s about quality of life for real people. Don’t design for edge cases. Don’t design for “regular” users first and then make alterations to accommodate. This implies you have to accommodate users with disabilities and compromise your design. We are designing for humans. And humans span a wide range of experiences, abilities, and aptitudes.

9. It’s everyone’s responsibility

Product owner — is responsible to mandate and resource teams to create accessible products
Product manager — defines accessibility requirements at the project level (AA, AAA, etc.)
User researcher — ensuring people with disability are included
Designers — are responsible for creating and designing accessible products. They document how the product works, what it looks like, but also navigation, the “hidden” interactions and what assistive technologies should announce. Practice documentation of the elements/components and interactions you have worked on: Add annotations within your Libraries (connect back to libraries). Add annotations in your mock-ups (use numbers and margin comments)
Interaction designer — considers the different ways people access the web. Reviews of colour and contrast choices.
Content author/designer — content structure and readability
Developer — handles authoring content that follows technology specifications and accessibility guidelines. They also document the technical implementation and semantic coding.
QA/tester — checks all everything is good before release. Also handles checking for compliance document accessibility test cases.
Accessibility Tester — Define and document accessibility test cases.

10. Add an accessibility policy

Adding an ‘accessibility policy’ to your company will help it drive and support your journey of accessibility and allow you to tell others about it too. Any accessibility goals you may have will be much easier to meet if you have both the support and the commitment from senior management.

11. Knowledge is power

There is a lot of information on the subject of accessibility. There shouldn’t be any expectations of knowing everything about everything. To gain the knowledge you can read articles, attend seminars and talks, watch a webinar, do an online course, and get involved with the community.

12. Take it one step at the time

To not get overwhelmed with the topic of accessibility and all the information thereof, focus on one aspect at a time. It can get complicated quickly, so aim to break down the topic into tiny chunks and review what is more beneficial to you first.

Accessibility benefits everyone, and it is essential for some but useful for all.
For instance, when you are looking at your smartphone outdoors, you will need sufficient colour contrast. When you want to watch a video but forgot your headphones, captions can help you. If your hand is broken, you can use a keyboard to interact with the web. Finally, we are humans, and we are bound to age, accessible design will help us over time.