Two weeks ago, to celebrate the tenth of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) on May 20th, our team’s Accessibility Lead, Joel Isaac challenged us to conduct a series of tasks in our daily work. These challenges were empathy builders and raised awareness on accessibility when we design and develop digital experiences for users. It was a great learning experience for me and inspired me to write down some of my learnings and reflections as a designer.
What is GAAD?
First, I would like to give a brief introduction to Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). It was originally inspired by a blog post back in 2011 by a web developer, Joe Devon to raise awareness on digital accessibility and global standards. Jennison Asuncion then joined with Devon to bring this day to life. It got celebrated on the third Thursday of May each year, to bring designers, developers, or other creators together to share, think and learn more about accessibility in the digital world. This year is the 10th anniversary of GAAD and it’s fascinating to see it impacting more than 1 billion people with disabilities around the world.
The Challenges
Then, let’s dive into these challenges! They are targeted to help us understand users with different levels of special needs from touching, hearing, seeing, etc. Either it’s permanent, temporary, or situational. Try to pick some of them to perform for 1 hour with your daily tasks.
- “No Mouse” Challenge: Disable or Unplug your mouse & trackpad. Try using your keyboard alone to accomplish your daily tasks. This challenge is to help us understand users who are not able to use a mouse as a navigation option due to issues with grip, tremors, and a host of other causes.
- “No Screen” Challenge: Turn on your device's built-in screen reader; turn off your screen; Try using the screen reader for one hour to accomplish your daily tasks. This challenge is targeted to help us understand users with daily visual challenges, and rely on screen readers to interact with digital devices.
- “No Sound” Challenge: Use a pair of earmuffs to block your ears and navigate to watch a video. This is to help us experience people who experiencing hearing loss.
- “Voice Only” Challenge: Turn on the voice controls for your device and manage your daily tasks with only voice controls for 1 hour. This task helps us empathize with users facing quadriplegia, Cerebral Palsy, and other issues that cause movement to be unpredictable. Voice controls became a more effective solution for them comparing to standard keyboard, mouse, or touch controls.
- “Single hand” Challenge: Try to use only one hand to perform daily tasks and use digital devices. We are being so used to using our hands to perform every single task in life. This challenge is to help us understand how the experience will be for loss of hand dexterity.
My Learnings
I was able to challenge myself with some of them in my daily work to really empathize with users with disabilities in digital experience and here are some highlights from my learnings and reflections.
Figuring out where I am was a struggle.
One of the biggest struggles I had was to figure out where I am during navigation. While taking the “No mouse” challenge, I relied heavily on my TAB key and the focus states to understand my location on a webpage or in an app. It became extremely difficult when focus states had unclear or missing visual indication. I found myself doing a lot of guesses and test clicks. Sometimes, the order of the links when you tab may also be different from what they visually appear to be. These discrepancies and unintuitive orders made the keyboard navigation experience frustrating, repetitive, and tedious.
Things became even harder for the “No Screen” challenge. I still relied heavily on my keyboard but this time, with voice indications only. I became immediately insecure and extremely cautious about the keys I pressed and the actions I was about to take because of not knowing what to expect. I found myself lost in simple tasks like navigation and not understanding which parts of the webpage are interactive because of a lack of voice indications in the screen reader.
Realizing the “barriers” we created in experiences.
When designing a digital experience, we always try to create “bridges” for users to solve their problems and provide an intuitive and pleasant experience for them. However, because of certain aspects we missed on accessibility when making design decisions, we are actually creating “barriers” instead of “bridges” for users with disabilities.
For example, when I was taking the “No Mouse” & “No Screen” challenges when I highly relied on keyboard navigation. I often found that certain parts of web pages are just inaccessible using keyboards, which made certain tasks almost impossible to perform, and I ended up in a loop of limited actions when I knew there are more elements I can interact with.
“Barriers” also got created frequently if we are using only visual, sometimes only color indications in designs. Of course, sometimes visual and color indications will improve the readability and discoverability, but we should also make sure to have additional indications like supporting text and screen reader text to make our design more inclusive for people with special needs.
Accessible design benefits everyone.
So, are we focusing on smaller groups of users when we focusing on accessible designs? The answer is No! When I was doing the challenges, it was fascinating to find that there are some accessibility features that I am already using in daily life. When taking the “Single Hand” Challenge, the iPhone has a handy feature that you can swipe down on the bottom edge of the screen to help you reach the top of the screen. I’ve already been using it a lot daily in public transportations (which is an example of situational mobility issues) when I had to use only one hand for my phone. It even benefited me when I once had a broken screen, and the top of the touch screen was not working. It helped my transition period before getting a new screen replacement much easier.
Another feature that I got benefited from a lot is closed captions or subtitles. English is a second language for me, and I have always struggled to understand complex conversations or characters with heavy accents when watching movies in theaters. So I have been always preferred to use video streaming services because of the subtitles to help me understand conversations and the story much better.
As designers, it is important to eliminate the assumption that accessibility features are only beneficial for a small portion of the users. But in fact, it is going to be an improvement for everyone’s experience.
Building empathy is the first step, building an accessible digital experience should be a continuous effort.
After taking these challenges, I started to gain a more concrete understanding of these real struggles when experiences are not accessible. As a user experience designer, I always believe wearing other people’s shoes is important to help us keep users in mind. And building digital accessibility is more than simply following guidelines and best practices, it is also important to understand the reasoning behind them and truly empathize with the users’ struggles when creating an accessible digital experience.
Hope this article about my experiences resonates with some of your feelings and thoughts. I know building empathy is only the first step when designing for accessibilities, there are a lot of useful resources to help incorporate this idea into our designs. Feel free to check out our previous posts about “Baking accessibility into everyday your design process” by Cintia Romero to learn more about tips and resources for accessibility.
Thanks for reading my experience of taking these GAAD challenges and I highly recommend you take time and try out some of them yourself. I am excited to hear your experience and how you improve accessibility in your design in comments :)
Special thanks to Joel Isaac for all the great empathy-building challenges.
