Why Accessibility is a Business Advantage
When we started to think about designing an app for StoryWorth, a service which collects and privately shares stories from your family members through insightful weekly questions, the first thing we thought about was accessibility.
StoryWorth’s customers span generations. Our typical user is an adult getting stories from their parents or grandparents to get to know them better and deepen their connection. Our basic service works through a combination of email and a website. Every week, a customer is emailed a question about their life, they answer with a story, and it’s then emailed to their recipients.
For most people this is easy enough to work fine. But, since ⅓ of StoryWorth’s users are aged 60 or older (and we even have a customer who recently turned 100!), we wanted to make sure to accommodate the needs of people who are less comfortable with technology, or find it harder to type. We added a voice recording option, where people can call a specific phone number and leave their story as a voice message. The story recipient gets the story as an audio file, and can get it transcribed to text.
Even though the feature was intended for users who weren’t comfortable with email, it helped shape our thinking about how to design. After all, some people might simply enjoy the oral tradition, and this feature made StoryWorth better for everybody.
Accessibility thinking — the principle of inclusive design — has a long history of making things better for everyone. The typewriter was invented so that Pellegrino Turri could have an easier time reading his blind lover’s letters. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone invention supported his work helping the deaf. And even Vint Cerf’s email protocols helped him communicate with his deaf wife while at work.[1]
In the US, 22% of adults have a disability.[2] Remember that for someone with an accessibility issue, if your app isn’t easy to use then they will never use it. You’ve lost a customer and a potential advocate for your product. Designing with this in mind is not only a strong business decision, but also makes your product better for everyone. Think of how adding elevators and ramps isn’t just a benefit for wheelchair users, but also for people with bikes and strollers and suitcases.
So after users asked us for an app, both to make it easier for everyone to access StoryWorth on the go, but also to reach even more potential storytellers, this was an obvious next step for the service. In the US alone in 2015, 30% of adults ages 65 or older owned a smartphone, and 32% owned a tablet.[3] The StoryWorth app makes it easier for older adults that may prefer apps to internet browsers, and is also perfect for younger users who spend more and more time on their mobile devices.
The app works either on its own or in conjunction with the email service. The same steps occur: you invite a relative you’d like to get to know better, StoryWorth sends them weekly questions, like “What’s the bravest thing you’ve ever seen?”, and they respond with a story that’s shared privately with you. Any of these steps can happen through the app, the emails, or through the site itself.
Within the app itself, we decided to keep things simple. There aren’t a lot of fiddly menus or confusing options, which also helps keep clickable areas nice and large. We integrated the voice recording option straight into the app — no need to flip between an email and make a phone call — to make it even easier for people who didn’t like to type.
And most important of all, we incorporated all of iOS’s accessibility capabilities. We can’t know how many of our users, or our potential users, might use StoryWorth if it were even easier, so we made sure we accounted for things like Dynamic Type and Voice Over for people with visual difficulties or motor skills impairments.
This is a business decision to make our user base happier and make it easier for StoryWorth to expand.
Fortunately, once you’re thinking about accessibility in your app design, there are a few very easy steps to get you started.
- Check out Apple’s developer page on iOS accessibility at https://developer.apple.com/accessibility/ios/. They provide links to programming guides, videos, and resources with all the information you need.
- If you use web views in your app, make sure you read this post on the official WebKit blog which goes into supporting Dynamic Type using CSS: https://webkit.org/blog/3709/using-the-system-font-in-web-content/
- Take advantage of auto layout and self sizing table view rows to create views whose content size can change without breaking.
- When designing your app, always consider what impact changing content size might have on your layout. It’s generally easier to scale things vertically than horizontally, so be especially wary of multi-column layouts.
Adding accessibility considerations to your app design is one of the easiest ways to expand your potential market and make your product stronger for everyone. At StoryWorth, our mission is to help everyone connect to their families through the power of shared stories. Without prioritizing accessibility, we have no chance of reaching this goal.
You can download our app and start a free trial right here.
