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DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY

The future of UX is digital accessibility 

A decade ago, ensuring the needs of people with disabilities wasn’t a priority. Now brands are competing for this outsized consumer segment of 1.85 billion people with $1.9 trillion in annual disposable income.

Digital  is an increasingly important resource in many aspects of life – from education and employment to ecommerce and health care – and it’s essential that it be accessible in order to provide equal access and opportunity to people with diverse abilities.

The future of UX is digital accessibility. Are your user experiences ready?

Enhancing Digital Experiences for All Users

Millions of people rely on quickly and easily accessing information and performing daily tasks on the internet. But users living with disabilities face increased barriers to accessing the same information because the typical design of websites, videos, podcasts, and mobile apps do not perform as needed on their devices.

More than 25% of adults in the United States live with some type of disability. It’s critical to ensure that all aspects of a digital experience are designed with full accessibility and these users in mind.

Adopting an adaptive strategy makes digital content accessible to people who utilize assistive technology and can diminish obstacles presented by poorly designed websites and other web applications. In fact, designing for accessibility benefits all users, both with and without disabilities, and helps the business engage with users in a more meaningful way.

Inclusive Design

Website users are not one size fits all. People interact with your digital experiences differently. For example, some may use a specialized braille keyboard to access content, and other web users would not. And almost everyone will use help text from time to time.

That’s why it’s important to make user experiences inclusive – a design process in which the needs of people with different abilities are specifically considered. Further, UX designers, content authors, and developers must consider how different environments and circumstances can affect a web user and remove those barriers.

Designing for Accessibility in Every Language
Creating inclusive and multilingual websites is complex but not without its benefits, especially to multilingual web users with disabilities. (6-minute read)
The Roundabout Truth: Carousels and Accessibility
While carousel components provide an appealing way to display several pieces of content in a neatly defined space, they prove to be problematic. (3-minute read)
Why Color Contrast Is a Top Priority in Accessible Design
When designing a page, color contrast and the ability for all users to interact with the page should be top of mind. (4-minute read)
Accessibility: Color Contrast
One of the most common roadblocks to accessing web content can be the lack of proper color contrast. (2-minute read)
Dark Mode and Digital Accessibility
Dark mode can be powerful for both those who require it and those for whom it just makes viewing convenient. (4-minute read)
The Importance of Interacting With the Web by Keyboard or Screen Reader
Keyboards and screen readers are useful forms of technology to navigate webpages and apps and give users the capability to navigate digital experiences. (5-minute read)
The Beauty of Simplicity The Key to Accessible Web Design
Designs created with an emphasis on ease of use offer accessibility by allowing the end user to easily predict expected behavior and outcomes. (3-minute read)
Digital Accessibility in the Healthcare Experience
To reach all consumers where they are –  which is increasingly online, mobile, and outside of traditional care settings – it’s essential to consider the diverse user stories and unique challenges that may impact how persons with disabilities access website content (now 1 in 4 in the U.S.). (5-minute read)

Interactive Media

Interactive media, such as videos, changed how companies engage with audiences. However, it also poses new challenges when it is not accessible to all web users. Examples of accessible features include closed captions and transcripts for both prerecorded and live audio and video content. Older and younger web users tend to use these features as well.

Accessible Videos: Live Captioning and Provide Downloadable Transcripts
The addition of captions and the button to download transcripts make video content more accessible. (2-minute read)
Accessible Videos: Highlight Your Stop, Pause, Hide, and Volume Controls/ Mute
It’s important that all types of video content allows the user to easily stop, pause, or hide the content whenever they need to. (2-minute read)
Three Reasons Why Accessible Video Helps Businesses
Users are diverse and so is the way they choose to consume media – video being one of the primary ones. (3-minute read)

Personas & User Stories

The opportunities to design for accessibility must consider how your target audiences will use your application or website and with what technologies, languages, abilities, and even in what location. To understand how your users will experience a website, begin by defining user stories and personas. These user research practices help designers look objectively at possible problems and solutions from the perspective of a set of users.

Understanding Disability Types for Effective UI Design: 3 Key Factors for Empathetic Problem-Solving
Designing a purposeful and responsible user interface starts with the person on the other end of the experience, who may have a disability. (6-minute read) 
Designing Accessible Digital Experiences Begins with Personas and User Stories
There’s no such thing as a user who never encounters issues accessing online information. But from an accessibility point of view, removing roadblocks is critical. (5-minute read)

Principles of Web Accessibility

To create a truly accessible experience, designers and developers should adhere to the four principles of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) enacted by the World Wide Web Consortium: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR). These guidelines are the foundation of inclusive digital experiences.

POUR: Designing for Accessibility With Perceivability in Mind
A perceivable design or web content simply means that people using assistive technology can know it’s there. (4-minute read)  
POUR: Designing for Accessibility With Operable in Mind
Operable guidelines are some of the easiest to understand because they are more definitive and less subjective for designers and developers to implement. (5-minute read)
POUR: Designing for Accessibility With Understandable in Mind
Designing to be understandable means ensuring users have a clear and concise understanding of the information and interface presented to them. (4-minute read)
POUR: Designing for Accessibility with Robustness in Mind
At the core of a robust design is considering the different ways people use their devices, especially assistive technology such as screen readers like Talkback and VoiceOver and voice-enabled personal assistants like Siri. (3-minute read)

Shift Left Design Process

Whether you’re starting from scratch or fixing the accessibility of your digital properties, start with a plan. In that plan is a shift left product development process to get you from requirements to quality assurance and production. In a nutshell, you must conduct user research, define your requirements, design for diversity, and put it into practice from the start, not as an afterthought.

A Process Integration Timeline of Accessibility Testing
Implementing accessibility end-to-end can be a challenging task. Still, if considered early, the result is a well-constructed UI that not only accommodates web users with disabilities but better serves all users. (4-minute read)
Plan to be Accessible by Design: Accessibility in the Product Development Lifecycle Part 1 of 4
Designing for digital accessibility by implementing shift left hinges on a team’s decision to develop for inclusion from the start. (5-minute read)
Define Initial Requirements: Accessibility in the Product Development Lifecycle Part 2 of 4
Teams that didn’t plan for digital accessibility from the start must consider this: It is possible to develop an accessible web resource by retrofitting accessibility at the end. However, the effort required can be considerable, and the resulting level of accessibility can vary substantially. (5-minute read)
Designing for Diversity: Accessibility in the Product Development Lifecycle – Part 3 of 4
Product teams should be keen to understand how people interact with digital content and media for three reasons. One, web users’ interactions with website content change over time. Two, it changes by situation. And three, it changes by ability. (4-minute read)
Accessibility Testing in the Product Development Lifecycle Part 4 of 4
Testing is a must! The accessibility of web content and user interface components relies on several evaluation methods: user testing, automated and manual testing, and QA tests. Without these checks, web users with disabilities may not have access to information. (5-minute read)

Standards & Tools

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides standards and guidelines on how to create accessible user experiences. However, even if you bake in these standards while designing your digital properties, it’s not a one-and-done practice. You must maintain your accessibility day in and day out – and there are tools to help you do so!

A New Standard for Interacting with the Web by Keyboard or Screen Reader
The W3C’s working draft of WCAG has key recommendations for making web content more accessible. (4-minute read)
A New Standard for Interacting With the Web: Beyond the Keyboard and Screen Reader
People are always changing or upgrading their devices, software, and browser versions. Technology solutions must adapt and keep up, especially for the more than one billion global users with disabilities. (4-minute read)
On the Horizon WCAG 2.2: A New Standard for Interacting with the Web
The latest WCAG 2.2 will likely include nine new success criteria to improve support for users of small or touch-screen devices, low-vision users, and users with cognitive, language, and learning disabilities. (6-minute read)
4 Helpful Tools for Fixing Web Accessibility Issues
Maintaining accessibility means incorporating automated testing tools to continuously utilize in your design and development processes and ultimately fix many key issues for web users with disabilities. (4-minute read)
A Brief Overview of Web Accessibility
The web plays a significant role in how we consume information. But accessing website content isn’t always easy for every user. (4-minute read)

Program Development

Accessibility remediation is not a one-off project. Accessibility should be part of all design processes and integrated into your design program from the beginning.

It’s a Program, Not a Project: Designing Websites for Accessibility
Many companies view accessibility remediation as a one-off project or a parallel effort to their current development life cycle. In fact, it is the opposite. (6-minute read)

Regulations

More and more countries are making digital accessibility a requirement, and the U.S. isn’t far behind. The Department of Justice (DOJ) urges all organizations to make their websites accessible, especially businesses open to the public.

Updated Guidance on Americans with Disability Act – Ensure Website Content is Accessible
The DOJ wants all businesses open to the public to prioritize website accessibility for people with disabilities. (4-minute read)

More Accessibility Insights

Want to learn more? Here are additional resources from Perficient.

Contact Us 

Lisa McMichael, Senior Manager, Digital Accessibility lisa.mcmichael@perficient.com 

Phil Fortier, Director, U.S. Consulting phil.fortier@perficient.com