Accessibility- why should we care?
What the hell is accessibility you may ask? My dev team last year had the same question.
The client wanted it and our product needed to be accessible. So our first approach was to research WCAG and ADA guidelines and implement it. This could be enough to be compliant with these standards, but there is more to it than just a simple marking checklist.
So let’s start with the basics, meaning the definition of accessibility. It’s a subcategory of product usability. Simply saying It’s designing a product in a way that makes it easy to use by people who wouldn’t use it otherwise. The main demographic for this design are people with disabilities.
What do these disabilities involve? We can group them into 4 main categories
Accessibility – types of disabilities.
Another fact that needs to be considered is how long this disability will remain with a person throughout their life. In this area, we can distinguish 3 types of disability:
Disability types.
First and most important reason: because it’s a human thing to care about others. Why? Because you exclude people and create barriers by making your product inaccessible.
Second, (from the business perspective) your application loses a lot of potential users. In the USA (for the year 2016) 20% of the overall population suffers from some sort of disability.
Another thing is that some clients (from federal or public sector) will require your product to be section 508 compliant i.e. accessible.
Finally, taking care of some of the accessibility issues can fix some UX and design problems in your product that will give value to your other users.
These are the tools that would help you evaluate accessibility on your site. If you know any other useful tools, please leave me a comment below.
Accessibility should be everyone’s concern. Like I said before your product creates barriers for your users. A lot of the projects do not think of it as a mandatory feature. I somehow get it, it cost more time and money, but try to convince your stakeholders that they may benefit from it. How? For instance, from a usability standpoint, the product gets more user-friendly not only for people with disabilities but for others as well. Start small, testing the accessibility for 1-2h a week. Check the contrast of your site first, then keyboard navigation and next iterate by WCAG list. Remember small steps approach:)
For further information, I’m posting here some links to websites, blogs etc. regarding this topic.
I highly recommend checking them out:
Test Lead, IT consultant. Patryk is the Company's first tester. An agile testing enthusiast who finds
fun and passion in exploratory testing and checkers automation. Tries to
be an advocate for clients and testing. In free time he plays indie
video games or can be found working out.
Patryk Oleksyk
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