Accessibility Sporza football app
Inclusive user involvement to achieve a broader UX
Accessibility as part of a fully-fledged User eXperience
VRT strives for designing and developing digital products offering an optimal User Experience to the widest possible audience.
Sounds logic, but we needed to tackle an important showstopper first: digital accessibility was often perceived as a separate layer to our products and considered too late in the process (or after the product launch).
By way of experiment, we decided to no longer emphasize the “accessibility” part of a product, we started speaking about a product’s “fully-fledged User Experience”.
We defined the “fully-fledged User Experience” as follows:
a logical and intuitive user interface, supported by an attractive and well-organized design, with relevant, up-to-date and qualitative content and compatible with all forms of user interaction.
The latter reflected well our goal: considering every type of (user) interaction such as keyboard navigation, speech commands, screen reader output, screen magnification…
Since we introduced the “fully-fledged UX” approach within the different teams and less explicitly emphasized “accessibility”, we noticed that accessibility was being taken into account much earlier in the different process stages: personas of people with disabilities, the elderly… were introduced on whiteboards, developers started developing with a solution-driven mindset rather than using a checklist-based approach…
The personas are based on “real people” and “real use cases”, resulting from surveys and live observation sessions. Example: a screen reader user would like to listen to the latest TV news broadcast on our news website.
Result: accessibility was taken into account much earlier in the process than before.
Inclusive user research and testing
We also started including inclusive user research throughout all stages of the design and development process. People with/without disabilities, elderly and people whose mother tongue isn’t Dutch participate at the same sessions to:
- discuss concepts, designs and functionalities of (new or existing) digital products
- perform (in-depth) user tests
Depending on the stage in the process we use a different approach, but one aspect always holds: bringing together a varied group of participants with a representative age distribution.
Recruitment of participants is done through multiple channels: social media posts, newsletters, interest groups, dedicated organisations…
Very quickly we noticed some important advantages:
the mutual respect for each other’s needs increased:
- people with a disability can clearly indicate what is really essential to them: at the same time, they also better understand that we “may” not be able to implement everything they wish
- people without disabilities understand better certain choices we make to achieve a fully-fledged UX and thus accommodate users’ special needs
we reach more easily a consensus across the different target groups because everyone participates simultaneously at the user sessions
As the first results are positive we will invest more time and effort in including inclusive user research in our design and development processes: the benefits yield measurable results and the teams/participants are highly motivated and enthusiastic.
Use case: the Sporza football app
A good example of a concrete result we achieved using this inclusive approach, with an intense collaboration of a representative panel of end users, is the Sporza football app.
This product was highly representative because it makes intensive use of tables (results & standings), live feeds, icons, abbreviations and so on.
The biggest challenges for us therefore were:
- proposing a listening and reading order of tabular data (match results, standings), both visually and audibly, in the most understandable way for all target groups
- offering the best possible user experience for match reports (live feeds), so that they are easy to follow, both visually and audibly
- making icons and abbreviations as understandable as possible for users with screen reading programs (provide the expanded form of each abbreviation, a clear alternative text for each icon…).
Audibly a slightly different sequence
As some of the tabular data in the app was not sufficiently clear to screen reader users, we needed to alter the regular linear reading order.
Example: a match result was visually presented as follows…
- Team name (Live) score Team name
But screen reader users preferred to hear this:
- Team name Team name (Live) score
As end users having difficulties with reading on screen may also use, by way of support, audio output, we needed to make sure that (slightly) altering the visual reading order didn’t impact their user experience.
In close collaboration with a variety of representative end users we carefully selected the screens/tables which we could safely alter (= influence auditory) without harming any target group.
We managed to reconcile something that is visually very recognizable and familiar to football fans with an understandable reading order for screen reader users wanting to follow their favourite teams and competitions.
We also attached a clear and understandable label to each icon and provided expansions for all abbreviations.
In a next post our developers will explain which (and how) accessibility features are introduced in our apps, testifying it requires a very feasible effort.
Looking ahead
We are aware that many companies and organisations may already work like this since quite some time but for us it was a first big step in ensuring that digital accessibility is introduced as early as possible in our processes and that teams and team leads are becoming fully aware that User eXperience may not be limited to end users using digital products in optimal circumstances.
We will therefore continue these efforts and experiments with “all users” in mind and, where possible, continue to invite them to all product-related sessions, from brainstorm to final testing.
Because we have seen positive results and therefore hope that our approach will inspire others.
