When it comes to digital accessibility, history has repeatedly proven that products with optimized accessibility are more straightforward for everyone to operate, not just users with disabilities.
The “Siri” and “Alexa” vocal command features of iPhones and Amazon devices began as accessibility measures allowing people with visual impairments to interact with their devices without using a touchscreen. But now, these features are used by millions of people without a disability every day, many of whom prefer them to traditional access methods.
With Siri and Alexa in mind, it’s easy to understand how crucial it is for developers to pursue innovative accessibility measures, innovations that make life simpler for users for everyone, including users with disabilities.
To create accessible digital products, businesses and developers have typically relied on beta testing by users with disabilities to inform accessibility measures. It would be best to have real-world users test a finished product and report on any issues they encounter to determine how accessible it is.
Users' feedback is undoubtedly an excellent resource for gauging whether changes need to be made to digital products to ensure accessibility. Still, it is only half of the journey towards digital accessibility. And it’s the second half of the journey.
Closing the loop
The first leg of the accessibility journey starts in the ideation and early development stages, long before real-world users would touch a finished product. Including developers and experts with disabilities in these early stages is the smoother (and cheaper) path toward genuine digital accessibility. And including diverse voices with disabilities early in the development process is the only path toward truly innovative tech like Siri and Alexa.
To exclude them in these planning stages risks following through with designs that may be well-intentioned but are not practically accessible. Getting too far in the development process without input from experts with disabilities could waste time and resources. It is a costly and painful process to scrap an entire prototype due to accessibility flaws. Wash, rinse, and hope you don’t repeat the same mistakes.
To avoid this, it’s best to loop in designers, developers, testers, and other stakeholders with disabilities right from the start.
While some companies who produce digital products like Twitter now include developers, coders, and experts with disabilities on their design teams, not all tech companies have demonstrated a willingness to invest in usability and accessibility in this way.
Given the many advantages of having voices with disabilities in the room, why don’t more digital creators include experts with disabilities from the beginning?
Tech yourself before you wreck yourself
The paradoxical and unfortunate answer is simply that many of the tools used in the development process are not always accessible to users with disabilities. Recent product research evaluated the accessibility of prototyping software, instrumental in digital product development and testing, with unimpressive results. Prototyping software allows designers to create mock-ups of user interface prototypes that can be shared with clients and tested by users. Some of the software evaluated included Balsamiq, Adobe XD, and UXPin.
Researchers used two standard screen readers—VoiceOver on macOS and Narrator on Windows—to attempt to access these popular prototyping software brands. The research documented when and where users could access various buttons and features in the software using a screen reader.
While there was some compatibility, there were still many accessibility failures, including no clear information on what certain buttons did and functionality failures that prevented users from clicking on buttons they wanted to access.
The results of this analysis found that most popular prototyping software is not compatible with screen readers and thus is not accessible to designers with visual impairments who use screen readers.
What the future holds
If the goal is to create digital products that are more accessible and inclusive, the solution is to include developers with disabilities in the process. How do companies get more developers with disabilities on product development teams? Well, the answer is to create digital products that are more accessible and inclusive, which would require more developers with disabilities on design teams. It’s the Catch-22 of digital design.
But it’s a paradox that we can solve. Starting at the top of the digital development food chain, designers of software like the prototyping software that is so instrumental to the industry must begin to themselves include developers with disabilities on their teams.
Including the voices of people with disabilities in the conversation benefits everyone.
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