Why Accessibility Matters for Architects
Based on Personal Experience
I’ve been legally blind in my left eye for the last couple of months. My right eye still works for now, but it’s been deteriorating while also straining to compensate for the loss of vision on my left side. If things were to keep progressing at their current rate, I would most likely lose my vision completely by the end of this year. Fortunately, my condition (early onset cataracts) is highly treatable with surgery, which I’ll be having soon.
My doctors aren’t sure why I developed cataracts so young or why they’ve been progressing so quickly, but that’s another story. Until I can get my eyes fixed, I have no choice but to live with severely impaired vision and try not to get too frustrated by how difficult it’s become to complete basic tasks.
A few examples:
- I have no peripheral vision on my left side, which makes me more likely to bump into things (or people) while I’m walking. At a recent World Tour event I realized how challenging it is to navigate through a crowded room with a visual field that’s been reduced by more than 50%.
- Our brains usually combine the inputs from both of our eyes to generate 3D images. Since I can only see out of one eye, my depth perception is off, which makes me trip over curbs, stairs and other raised surfaces that appear flat when I look at them.
- And I’ve struggled to use some of the applications and websites that I used to rely on every day because their color schemes, page layouts and small font sizes make it difficult for me to figure out where to type or click.
All of these experiences have been frustrating and embarrassing. As an architect, I want to focus on the last one because it’s something that we can actually control as technologists.
Designing accessible applications is a legal requirement in some jurisdictions. We cover this in Salesforce Well-Architected — Compliant. And you should always take all applicable regulations into consideration whenever you design a solution. Beyond that though, there are even more compelling reasons to include accessibility in your designs. Being able to empathize with your users and make sure that anyone can use your solutions, regardless of their abilities, will inspire stakeholder trust and increase productivity across your organization.
When your users have to struggle to read field labels with tiny fonts or differentiate between colors in a diagram, the amount of time it takes them to fill out a form or interpret data will increase exponentially. Tasks that should take fractions of a second can stretch out to several minutes. Those additional minutes can add up to hours of wasted time throughout someone’s workweek (assuming that person can even get their work done at all). Ensuring that your solutions adhere to accessibility guidelines will help your users recover their lost time while also reducing the likelihood of a number of other issues:
- You’ll see higher adoption rates and increased trust if all of your users feel comfortable using your solutions to get their work done.
- You’ll see an increase in data quality if all of your users can enter data into your systems and interpret reports and dashboards efficiently.
- You’ll be less likely to see shadow IT solutions popping up in your landscape if your users don’t feel like they have to rely on unofficial solutions with better accessibility features to get their work done.
To make your solutions more accessible, you’ll need to follow an approach that combines an understanding industry guidelines, good design standards and thorough test plans. You can read the guidance in Salesforce Well-Architected for more detailed information, but the initial steps are:
- Add a section to your design standards that contains your organization’s accessibility requirements, along with any devices that may be used for data input beyond a standard keyboard and mouse (this can include things like screen readers or speech-to-text devices). If your organization doesn’t already have a set of design standards, use the Design Standards Template that’s available on the Salesforce Architects Website as a starting point.
- Review the Salesforce Accessibility Conformance Reports, which contain information about the accessibility status of all of our products. Make sure that they’re sufficient for your organization based on the information you’ve added to your design standards. Most of our UI-based controls like Lightning Web Components and Experience Cloud Templates were built to adhere to accessibility standards, but you may have additional requirements based on your industry, location or users. Identifying gaps early will help you plan for any customizations that may be needed to close them.
- Work with a UX designer to ensure that all of the navigation paths in your UI are consistent and that you’re following Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for things like page layouts, font sizes and color usage.
- Include accessibility testing in your test plans. Ideally, you should have users with disabilities execute your accessibility tests if possible. There are organizations that offer accessibility testing as a service if you need assistance.
When I tell people about the issues I’ve been having with my vision, the most common response I get is “Wow, I couldn’t tell at all…”, which underscores the importance of proactively including accessibility in your designs. I’m lucky that my condition isn’t permanent. Many others aren’t as fortunate and disabilities aren’t always easy to spot. You might not know who you’re actually helping by eliminating accessibility related anti-patterns from your solutions, but taking the time to do it will have a huge impact on your users and your organization.
