Stop sleeping on accessibility

Hey all, I just wanted to share a quick experience that I've had recently. An experience that was long overdue as a designer. That is participating in accessibility usability reviews.

Now, at my company, and in previous jobs, I've always done what I knew to do to ensure our products/websites meet basic accessibility standards, but we had never gathered a group of individuals with varying degrees of accessibility needs to test our products and provide us with feedback from their perspective. That is until recently when we ran a series of sessions with folks with all different needs. I've been a designer for over 15 years, and I have to say, it has been a transformative experience for me.

We spoke with folks with light sensitivity issues, as well as folks who have been blind since birth. We spoke with folks with hearing loss, severe anxiety, partial brain damage, as well as a user with PTSD from fighting in wars in the middle east. The insights gathered from these sessions will influence the way in which I approach design for the rest of my career.

Simple things that we don't even think about, are things that cause so much stress and issues for a portion of our users. Decision decisions we've made that we think make our products clean and simple, do almost the opposite for some folks. It was truly eye opening for us. We even have a team member who has been at the company for 22 years who has said that these sessions have been the most rewarding experience in her entire time at the company.

I won't go into all of the details, but I wanted to highlight a couple of key findings throughout these sessions:

1. White backgrounds with lots of whitespace is horrible for anybody with light sensitivity issues. Not only that, but it was called out by multiple people, including folks with light sensitivity issues, partial blindness, anxiety, and PTSD as something that really hurt their eyes when they tried to focus on the page. Simple solutions would be to not use bright white background, or provide a dark mode. Almost all preferred dark mode.

2. Test test test on a screenreader. If you want to see something incredible, watch a user who has been blind since birth try to navigate your product/site. The speed at which they are able to navigate using a screenreader is jaw dropping, and things that they encounter will make you shake your head. Spend quality time ensuring that folks with screen readers can flow through your product as you intended.

3. For the love of god and all things holy, use alt text on your images. A direct quote from a completely blind user was "I know that these are all your social media links, but i don't have a clue which one is which". This is because whoever implemented this section used social media icons, and didn't put alt tags. This happened in other places too, it's such an easy fix, just do it as it makes things 100x easier for users.

4. Don't just do the minimum required colour contrast. Sure, your medium grey on white passes the contrast checker, but that doesn't mean it will work for everyone. Make it a little bit darker, so that it's that much easier for folks with vision problems to read. It will make a big difference to them, I promise.

5. Lastly, do all of this not just to pass accessibility standards, but do it because it's the right thing to do. Questions will inevitable arise such as "does it make sense to put this much effort in for such a small percentage of our user base?" My answer, as a design leader, is emphatically YES. It is absolutely worth it. After every single session, we expressed our sincere thanks to our testers for providing us with much needed insights. Their response every single time was "no, thank you for thinking of us, and including us in this". We take for granted how easy it is to browse the internet, use apps, buy things online, etc, and we don't realize that for a not insignificant amount of people, it is tremendously more difficult, stress-inducing, and frustrating. The least we could do when building things, is put a little bit more effort in so that we can create a great experience for all users.

With that said, if you are building something, I highly recommend reaching out to folks with specific accessibility needs, and have them tell you what THEIR experience is like using your product.

Thanks and I hope this is useful!