Accessibility compliance has been top of mind lately.
Chances are, you’ve been wondering whether your digital product needs to be compliant. Your team might have already tried fitting it into your product roadmap.
In the US, organizations receiving federal funding began considering WCAG 2.1 requirements after the new legislation passed.
Digital products with European customers (including companies outside the EU) have started preparing for compliance with the European Accessibility Act (EAA).
We have written guides on Navigating the European Accessibility Act (EAA), as well as the new accessibility ruling in the US. We didn’t delve into the exceptions in the respective legislations, and that wasn’t a bug, it was a feature.
We strongly believe your time is better spent crafting a strong product strategy and user experience with your available resources, rather than focusing on where to cut corners.
“But do I really need to worry about this right now?” We hear you. You don’t have the resources to add yet another thing to your product. Do you even have users who would benefit from accessibility?
Even companies that know their product must comply with legal requirements often find accessibility fighting for a share of the budget and constantly shifting in priority.
What if we told you accessibility doesn’t have to be a costly, time-consuming feature tacked onto your product? Or that it doesn’t have to be an endless stream of fixes passed around like a hot potato?
Accessibility can become a practice embedded in Product, Design, and Development; one that can supercharge your product strategy. Here’s how.
Build a process, not a stream of fixes
Great software doesn’t happen by accident. Without a strong process, things can quickly become inefficient, expensive, and prone to breaking.
Just as we wouldn’t recommend shipping untested code only to discover bugs compromising stability and security at the end of the software lifecycle, we don’t view accessibility as a series of audits, last-minute tests, and fixes. In fact, auditing and fixing a product can become very expensive if accessibility hasn’t been integrated into the design and development process from the start.
Accessibility is not a feature either. Your product can’t rely solely on the built-in accessibility features of your framework or pattern library, nor can it achieve accessibility by retrofitting features after the final round of testing.
And that’s actually a good thing.
Embedding accessibility into your project workflow is a pillar of software quality, and it also helps your team save time and money along the way.
Some first steps to start embedding accessibility into your team’s workflow:
- Ensure Product Managers, Designers, and Developers have a baseline understanding of accessibility and know their role in creating an accessible product. A recommended resource: Diverse Abilities and Barriers.
- Define and document your process and accessibility guidelines to inform project decisions and team practices.
- Don’t assume your users have no accessibility needs. People’s abilities, devices, and even internet speeds vary depending on their circumstances, and this won’t always be obvious to you. Plan and budget for success in that reality.
- Add accessibility to your definition of done, acceptance criteria, or Job story outcomes.
- Conduct regular testing throughout your software lifecycle.
Accessibility and inclusion happen at the intersection of your product, its users, and their circumstances. Designing your product workflow with a broader perspective helps you craft a more competitive product.
Design to remove barriers, not to tick boxes
A key part of designing products people actually use is understanding your users, their needs, and their circumstances. Removing barriers to using your product is a fundamental part of the user experience design process because, well, you want people to use your product in the first place.
This is where usability and accessibility act as constraints that guide you toward designing a better experience for all users. Great design views these constraints as a lens for problem-solving.
Compliance checklists can be useful when reviewing and testing your work, but checking off color contrast alone won’t fix a feature or a product that was designed for perfect, imaginary users and ideal circumstances.
Some first steps to improve your design process and product through the lens of usability, accessibility, and inclusion are:
- Learn about assistive technologies, adaptive strategies, and how the main categories of disabilities, impairments, limitations, or constraints affect how people use digital products.
- Conduct user research and testing with participants who reflect the diverse abilities, circumstances, and backgrounds of your real users.
- Guide the design process by capturing your insights into inclusive personas or persona spectrums. Everyone (including your users) has different abilities, tools, preferences, and expectations that influence how they interact with digital products.
- Enable users to set their preferences and customize your software to fit their needs.
Accounting for permanent and temporary disabilities, varying circumstances, and underlying biases leads to stronger, more successful products.
Develop a robust, adaptable product
Your product has to succeed in a very competitive market. And we’re no longer in the era of “move fast and break things.”
Product teams achieving excellence and high retention today understand where speed matters, and where it doesn’t. The banking app that a sleep-deprived parent or a person with chronic pain is trying to use is not one of the things that should break because your team is moving fast.
Users also access your product from a wider range of devices than ever, and you can’t fully control how it behaves on each of them. That means your software must be adaptable.
Fortunately, accessibility helps exactly with that: creating robust, adaptable software that works for everyone, regardless of their device or abilities.
Some first steps to start leveraging accessibility to develop better products are:
- Integrate tools like axe-core, Lighthouse, or AccessLint for automated accessibility testing in your development and build processes. These tools can catch many accessibility errors within compliance thresholds, but remember: they alone won’t guarantee an accessible product. There are plenty of examples of innaccessible code that achieves theoretically perfect scores in such tools.
- Conduct accessibility testing throughout your development cycle, not just at the end.
- Familiarize yourself enough with adaptive strategies and assistive technologies so that you can manually test your software with them.
- Prioritize clean, well-structured, semantic HTML. If using native HTML elements or attributes isn’t feasible, take the time to understand their semantics and behavior to avoid misapplying ARIA.
- Embrace progressive enhancement. Build a minimum viable experience for situations where users can’t access the ideal experience you envisioned.
Reach your full market potential
The idea that people with disabilities don’t use your product is a myth. There’s no niche of users who “need accessibility” while everyone else does fine without it.
According to the WHO, an estimated 1.3 billion people have a recognized disability. This represents 16% of the world’s population, or 1 in 6 of us. And this is just a fraction of those who encounter barriers in their daily lives.
Nearly everyone experiences some form of disability (whether permanent, temporary, or situational) at some point in their life. As the global population ages their abilities are also changing over time.
People with disabilities need to use digital products just as others do. Most of the time, you won’t know they have disabilities or detect that they are using assistive technologies. Nor should you be trying to.
Don’t be deceived by survivorship bias. If you haven’t heard from disabled users, it’s likely because your product has already frustrated or alienated them.
Inclusion opens the door to a much broader market.
Use quality to differentiate your product and brand
It is a tough market out there, and it’s only growing more so.
Few companies launch products with truly unique features, and big breakthroughs are increasingly rare. Today, product quality drives differentiation.
Chances are your product isn’t the only one in its category. Delivering a user experience that exceeds the bare minimum is your competitive edge, the reason users and clients will consistently choose you over competitors.
Solve real problems, and support your users by designing experiences that are usable, efficient, and polished. Tailor your product to meet their needs. Provide them with robust, reliable software. Craft accessible experiences to prevent frustration, exclusion, and alienation.
You will discover that removing barriers for people with disabilities enhances the experience for all users. Inclusive software improves usability, customer satisfaction, and retention. Genuine commitment to accessibility strengthens brand trust and loyalty.
Build a product that serves people and delivers value, not one that merely meets the bare minimum.
Go beyond compliance: deliver your most valuable product instead
If your team is asking, “Can’t accessibility wait for later (whenever that is)?”, consider this instead: Will your product stay competitive as we move through fast technological and social changes?
Whether you want to start with a solid foundation, or improve an existing product, having an accessible experience is fundamental.
Let’s chat about how we can help you:
- assess your current accessibility status
- develop a comprehensive accessibility plan
- remediate and improve existing accessibility gaps
- strengthen your organization’s skills and processes
- build inclusive solutions that work for all users, regardless of their device or ability.
Reach out to thoughtbot today to begin integrating accessibility into your strategy. Together, we’ll build a stronger product that goes beyond compliance.
Resources and further reading
Intro to accessibility, by thoughtbot
Design best practices from a DEI perspective, by thoughtbot
The Business Case for Digital Accessibility, by W3C
Accessibility for product managers, by Digital.gov
Accessibility for front-end developers, by Digital.gov
Accessibility for user experience designers, by Digital.gov
Do’s and Don’ts of designing for accessibility, by GOV.UK
Accessibility, Usability, and Inclusion, by W3C
How People with Disabilities Use the Web, by W3C
Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit, by Microsoft
Inclusive Design Principles, by Henny Swan, Ian Pouncey, Heydon Pickering, Léonie Watson