What is accessibility
“Accessibility enables people with disabilities to perceive, understand, navigate, interact with, and contribute to the web.” – Jesse Hausler.
The goal of Accessibility is to make the Web a place with equal access and opportunities to people with diverse abilities. The domain of accessibility has systematically been overlooked in the past. Even today, things are not really what they should be. Companies don’t focus on people with disabilities – or ‘with different abilities’ as I prefer – to use their product, for budget and time reasons. Sadly enough, they don’t believe the market is big enough to make the investment, leaving different-abled people out of many applications, which could otherwise be very useful to them.
Recently I joined a highly professional team, working on a banking application for tablet. Accessibility was part of the scope of this project, and for me, it was the first time to actually work on something that would also be fit for people with different abilities. My job was to find the flaws in the application where these people might get confused. We focused mainly on the visually impaired. So I sat down, plugged in my earphones in the tablet, started accessibility mode (VoiceOver), fired up the app, closed my eyes and went through the application. (For those who have never used it, VoiceOver reads out what is on the screen, content and buttons alike.)
It needs mentioning that I am not a professional in accessibility, and that there are companies out there who focus specifically on this subject (although the ones with mobile knowledge are hard to find, we fortunately came across Accessibility Partners). The following is my experience.
It was a frustrating experience and I found there was still some work to be done in order to have accessibility on an acceptable level. It was probably frustrating because I am not used to working without seeing what I’m doing. The learning curve for getting used to accessibility mode (different swiping commands, finding a button, etc) must have had some part in this. Add the OS differences (Android versus iOS) in accessibility commands to this list and you’ll probably guess why this was not easy. I found a couple of issues, but I was not sure that some of them would be real issues to our users for I was not sure how they actually use it. After a few tries myself, we decided that we would get richer information from an actual user. Accessibility user testing is what we needed.
The need for access
What I did find myself, was that some parts of the application where wrongly implemented. Some plain text for example, was implemented as textfield by mistake, which was read out as such and therefore confusing for our accessibility target group. The tests showed us some development mistakes as well as accessibility flaws. In the end, we managed to get a reasonable accessibility level. Although many companies still need to see the need to address accessibility, many others already do so. App- and game developers for instance spend time trying to figure out how to make their products more accessible for different audiences.
As developers of web and mobile apps, and in a world driven more and more by digital, we all carry a part of the responsibility to create inclusive applications.