Around the world, more than one billion people have some form of disability. So that’s about 15% to 20% of the world’s entire population. Check the source: World Health Org. So the global market of people with disabilities is over 1 billion people with a spending power of more than $6 trillion. Check the information on The Business Case for Digital Accessibility page.

We can name five significant categories of situational, temporary, or permanent disabilities:

1. Visual (this includes photosensitive epilepsy)
2. Motor disabilities, related to the body (physical) or nerves (neurological)
3. Auditory (about hearing).
4. Speech disabilities, related to voice, mouth, and tongue or even an inability to hear own voice
5. Cognitive (about learning and understanding)

A large number of disabilities are invisible from the outside. Designing with accessibility in mind makes interfaces and experiences more usable for everyone — even those without a disability.

Keep in mind that designing for accessibility is not:

• about passing automated checks;
• meeting legal or project requirements;
• considering edge cases.

Not only. It’s designing for people, just for people.

Many design articles or books point out the importance of inclusion and accessibility. However, they are the most overlooked because accessibility is difficult to test and measure. Lack of budget, time, understanding of how to test accessibility, and misconceptions about who will benefit from it lead to continually postponing design for accessibility.

To start testing for accessibility, Designers and Organisations must overcome a few challenges.

“Choose a Methodology” challenge

There are two major ways to assess the accessibility of a digital product:

• Auditing (Manual, Automatic, and Expert)
• Testing (Accessibility and Usability)

Audit

The audit does not involve end-users and is performed with the live product and the prototype design. Auditing is about verification, remediation, and compliance. By essence, it compares the design with the requirements of standards or laws.

An audit can be:

(1) Manual — designers go through interfaces to find accessibility issues. Usually, they do manual checkups as they create prototypes using accessibility checklists.

(2) Automatic — accessibility check by:

• desktop tools:
• The A11y Machine — tool can be downloaded from GitHub and serves as an automated accessibility testing tool.
• SortSite (Power Mapper) is a popular one-click user experience testing tool for Mac, OS X, and Windows.
• Accessibility Checker by CKEditor— inspects the level of accessibility.
• online services:
• WAVE — a suite of evaluation tools that helps authors make their web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities.
• Dynomapper — a Visual Sitemap Generator of 4 types Default, Circle, Tree, and Folder
• browser plug-ins:
• ARC Toolkit — a set of accessibility tools that aids developers in identifying accessibility problems and features for WCAG 2.0, WCAG 2.1, EN 301 549, and Section 508.
• WAVE — Chrome, Firefox, and Edge extensions allow you to evaluate web content for accessibility issues directly within your browser.
• Axe — Web Accessibility Testing (Chrome) — Find and fix more accessibility issues during website development with Axe DevTools.
• Siteimprove browser extensions (Accessibility Checker) — free extension lets you check any multi-step form, dynamic content, or non-public page for accessibility issues.
• ANDI favelet/bookmarklet — Accessible Name & Description Inspector is a free accessibility testing tool.
• TPGi’s Colour Contrast Analyser (CCA) — free color contrast checker tool that allows you to quickly determine the contrast ratio of two colors simply using an eyedrop tool
• Line Height Adjuster (Chrome) — to adjust line height within a reasonable range.
• Spectrum (Chrome) — to test web pages for people with different types of Color Vision Deficiency.
• Accessibility monitor (Chrome) — continuously monitor accessibility failures in a page as it’s being used.
• Images ON/OFF (Chrome) — extension to disable/enable images on the current site.
• HeadingsMap (Chrome) — To show, browse, and audit (for accessibility and SEO) the headings structure.
• design plug-ins:
• Stark (Adobe XD / Sketch / Figma) — an integrated suite of tools to make their software products more accessible and compliant.
• Color Blind (Figma) — to view your designs in the eight different types of color vision deficiencies.
• A11y Color Contrast Checker (Figma) — checks the color contrast ratio of all visible text in a frame, and it provides feedback on whether it meets WCAG’s AA and/or AAA level compliance.
• Mobile Apps (iOS and Android provide an excellent description of built-in accessibility features):
• Accessibility Scanner on Android
• iOS accessibility inspector

Find other Web accessibility evaluation tools on the W3C website.

(3) Expert — accessibility check by a person guided by standards (the best known is WCAG — check WCAG website) and accessibility laws (for example, the ADA in the US — check the ADA website).

W3C has produced two other sets of accessibility guidelines as well:

• The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) — about making authoring tools accessible (like the Content Management Systems -WordPress, Drupal);
• TheUser Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) — about making user agents accessible (such as web browsers, media players, etc.).

If you design digital products for US-based businesses or organizations, there are US laws you need to know about:

• Section 508 — covers government agencies and organizations receiving government funding, such as universities.
• The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) — covers businesses and, most often, their websites.

If your primary market is the EU:

• The EU Web Accessibility Directive (EN 501–349) — is binding on all European Union member states.

Other countries have their web accessibility laws, such as the Equality Act and also regulations for the public sector in the UK, the AODA in Canada, the DDA in Australia, to mention just a few. These are all based on, or reference, the WCAG.

For some countries, the requirements only apply to government organizations, and in others - to both public and private companies.

Testing

Unlike auditing, testing is based on working with end-users — people with disabilities — and involves a series of facilitated one-on-one sessions.

(1) Usability testing — focuses on researching:

• if the product is easy and intuitive;
• if users can use it without any instructions;
• how user-friendly the product is.

While usability tests may evaluate how usable and accessible solutions are for some people with disabilities, they alone can not address all accessibility issues and don’t evaluate conformance to accessibility standards.

(2) Accessibility testing — focuses on analyzing:

• if the product can be easily accessed by different types of users, including people with disabilities;
• if the product can be used with various tools used by them.

There may be different criteria for participants depending on:

• the senses necessary for working with your digital product (for example, touch and haptic, sight and colors, hearing and speaking);
• assistive technologies users with disabilities can or prefer to use.

People use a variety of technologies to assist them, such as:

• Alternative web browsers
• Braille for the web
• Eye-tracking software
• Head wands
• Mouth sticks
• Screen magnifiers (ZoomText)
• Screen readers (such as JAWS)
• Computer vision (check VizWiz, TapTapSee)
• Voice Recognition software ( Dragon Naturally Speaking)

Remember that all usability issues worsen if the person has a disability. So “accessibility” should be considered part of the definition of “usability.” as suggested by Léonie Watson’s in her article Accessibility is part of UX (it isn’t a swear word).

“People often go a bit wobbly when accessibility is mentioned. Visions of text-only websites, monochrome designs, and static content swirl in their heads. Teeth are gritted, excuses are prepared, and battle conditions ensue. The reality is that accessibility is simply a key part of UX.” — Léonie Watson.

Testing with people with disabilities can reveal not only accessibility issues but also problems with usability. For instance, finding whether the product is compatible with assistive technologies can evaluate whether the navigation is structured logically.

Differences:

• The audit covers all pages and functions and is not limited to the chosen scenarios. Testing examines a digital product in the natural environment.
• Auditing relies on standards that may not be perfect. Testing helps to reveal the real users’ behavior.
• Compliance with the standards may protect the company from lawsuits in countries with strict legislation but not guarantee high ease of use. Testing may cover this gap.

Which one to pick?

Each method has advantages and disadvantages, which designers can compensate by combining them to identify most accessibility issues.

Accessibility testing nowadays is underestimated, so practiced much less often than an audit. Designers and Testers seem to be embarrassed to invite people with disabilities, afraid to offend them during the session, or do not know where to look for them.

“Find users to test with” challenge

Finding people with disabilities may seem more problematic as it is. However, there are some sources where designers can find the right users:

(1) Communities in social networks

The advance of assistive technologies such as screen readers and voice input slowly removes barriers, enabling visually impaired people to use social media with the whole experience. For example, Wentz & Lazar user studies in 2011 have found that visually impaired users can complete most tasks through Facebook’s mobile interface.

There are already some famous and popular bloggers with disabilities. For example, you may check the Instagram account of Tommy Edison (open “blindfilmcritic” Instagram account), who has been blind since birth and has uploaded over 1000 photos/videos and has more than 30 k subscribers.

In their research, Wu S. and Adamic L. mentioned, “visually impaired users openly talk about their experiences and issues with vision disability and web accessibility.” So do not hesitate to contact them.

(2) Public organizations and social enterprises

Many different organizations have access to people with disabilities. For example, Social Enterprize UK, the most extensive network of social enterprises in the UK, can help find users with different disabilities. Suppose you need to recruit participants with visual disabilities in the United States — the National Federation of the Blind (check the federation’s website) or Carroll Center for the Blind in Massachusetts (check center’s website) can help you contact needed people.

(3) Platforms for recruiting testers

Services like Access Works (check Access Works website) or UserTesting (access UserTesting website) help get quality human insights and access to a global and diverse contributor network. Accessibility Services platform (open Accessibility Services website) supports organizations in the private, public, and charitable sectors to create an accessible environment, both digitally and physically.

So as a summary, we can say that Accessibility Testing can help designers and organizations to identify both accessibility and usability issues. For a better result, combining testing with an audit is recommended. Users can always be found through communities and public organizations.

References

• Wentz, B., and Lazar, J. Are separate interfaces inherently unequal?: an evaluation with blind users of the usability of two interfaces for a social networking platform. In Proc iConference’11 (2011).
• Wu S., and Adamic L. Visually Impaired Users on an Online Social Network. https://research.fb.com/publications/visually-impaired-users-on-an-online-social-network/