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This July, we are celebrating Disability Pride Month. It’s a fantastic opportunity to shine a light on the significance of digital accessibility and how we can tackle barriers and foster inclusivity as a digital product agency.
At ASquared, ensuring our digital products are accessible is incredibly important to us. There’s so much to consider when designing and building to ensure your product is accessible, from link padding & button sizes to image alt text & captions and meaningful HTML tags for screen readers. Every element that makes up an app or website can be enhanced for accessibility purposes.
In this blog, we’ve spoken with Sylvia (Software Engineer) and Marietta (Product Designer) to delve into why digital accessibility matters, share some resources and tips, and demonstrate why being accessible can benefit everyone.
Marietta: Digital accessibility should be important not only to people experiencing a disability, but to everyone. I think when people hear the word “disability” they have an image pop up in their head of someone with a permanent, physical disability, but there’s also learning disabilities and temporary disabilities too that can last from a few minutes to several weeks. Accessibility should mean catering for everyone, as anyone might find one day that their ability to perform daily tasks is impacted. Situational instances can come into play as well. Take, for example, a person holding a child. They may only have one hand free to use their phone or computer, so accessible design can benefit them by making it easier to navigate and interact with digital content.
Sylvia: Yes, I agree. Being accessible is when anyone can use your product without experiencing any barriers. According to the World Health Organization, it’s estimated that 1.3 billion people experience a significant disability, representing 1 in 6 of us (2023). So when you take into account people who are affected by temporary disabilities too, then that number would be a lot higher. Building an accessible product isn’t only providing for a minority (which is still hugely important), it will affect all of our experiences for the better.
Marietta: It also took me a while to separate accessibility and inclusion, but it’s important to understand the difference. You can be accessible, but not inclusive. Accessibility means barriers are removed from using a product and is usually measured against a certain criteria such as asking “is this website optimised for screen readers?”. Inclusive design goes a step further. It isn’t for a specific audience or scenario but for a broader range of users, moving from practicality to enjoyment.
Sylvia: I’ve always been taught to keep digital accessibility in mind. Throughout my coding bootcamp, they emphasised the importance of accessibility and told us to envision who will be using the product and what barriers they might experience. So it’s always been there for me, but it’s a matter of applying my knowledge where I see fit. Ideally, every product would be inclusive, but it can be hard to implement and depends on whether you’re building the product from scratch and how the product has been designed.
Marietta: To be honest, I started my career as a product designer without knowing much about digital accessibility. However, when I moved to the UK, my knowledge started growing. My work at the time involved designing digital products for a pharmaceutical company, specifically for people with diabetes. Through research and speaking with users who were diagnosed as diabetic, I started to gain a clearer picture of who I was designing for. Since vision deficiencies are a complication of diabetes (blurred or patchy vision), I had to ensure my designs were accessible and the knowledge I gained from my reading really helped me to view my designs through a more inclusive lens.
Marietta: With design, it’s best to start at the very beginning. Right at brand inception. As a brand designer, you can’t only think of print anymore and how colours are going to appear once printed. You also have to think about web accessibility. So, if a brand isn’t web accessible you might find yourself going back to the drawing board and it’s definitely better to have this problem early on. Otherwise, attempting a rebrand when you’re already an established company might mean losing out on some of your audience if you’re no longer recognisable. The main thing to consider when choosing your brand colours is whether they’re compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Sylvia: For developers it starts at the beginning too, and integrating that idea during the build stage of your product is crucial. However, there’s always room for improvement in accessibility for both designers and developers. There’s usually only so much you can do in a given set of time and it also depends on the client and if they have a specific audience. So, even though having considerations at the start is best, you should try to think about accessibility at all times. Only 3% of the internet is accessible… yes, you read that right (UserWay). So try and make the time for it!
Sylvia: There’s different ways to incorporate accessibility in web and mobile. As web has been around longer and is more established, there’s more accessibility libraries available to use. There are libraries allowing you to trigger text-to-speech for screen readers, and also certain techniques you can use to help users tab through a page. A good tip for achieving this is to build the flow in the order it is meant to be read at, instead of building for the visual aspect. For mobile, it’s a bit harder as there’s so many different models and screen sizes, so there’s extra things to consider, like how to deal with text size for smaller screens. I’d say an important accessibility feature that shouldn’t be missed is to always have a light and dark theme.
Marietta: Designers always need to be checking their digital accessibility score. You can do so using plugins on Figma to test the different contrasts and typography. Using white and yellow might not be great for copy text as it uses smaller type sizes, but it could be fine for headings where the type size is larger. So using the accessibility score can help you calibrate and test your work. It’s best to aim for at least an AA rating, as that’s the most desired level of conformance to the WCAG.
Marietta: Colour contrasts. Even though it’s easy to check nowadays (such as by using an accessibility scorer), it’s still being overlooked a lot of the time. If you can improve the contrast between the background colour and text colour, then you’ll be making your content easier for everyone to read.
Sylvia: Accessible digital experiences are more behind than they should be. As developers build based on the product design and user story, it can be hard to add on accessibility during the build stage as it already feels like an afterthought by that point. So I’d say the main issue that’s overlooked is just making the time to think about accessibility… as I mentioned earlier, there’s always more that can be done!
Sylvia: To have all digital experiences be accessible for people who are only able to use technology with one hand. In the meantime though, having a bottom navigation within thumb distance on a mobile app, extending time outs on sessions, and increasing link padding and button sizes so that clickable targets are easier to hit are just some things that can help.
Marietta: 100% agree! It wouldn’t only help people with a physical disability, but also others with situational or temporary disabilities. As I mentioned earlier, parents are impacted by design that isn’t accessible for one-hand use, but if we could remove those barriers so that you’re able to book an appointment, message a friend, or order a taxi all whilst holding your child (and make it stress-free), then that would be a real accomplishment.
Marietta: For Figma there’s quite a few plugins that allow you to test the accessibility of your design. Some of the ones I use are Stark, Utopia and A11y which are contrast and typeface checkers. The UK government website is also a brilliant resource to learn more about the current accessibility guidelines and design principles. They really put it at the heart of everything they do.
Sylvia: Our quality assurance testing is all done manually, but otherwise our greatest resource are the accessibility libraries. It would be brilliant if it became a requirement to make testing more inclusive so that we’re able to get direct feedback from people with disabilities.
Marietta: There’s a website called Diversity and Inclusivity which is fantastic at showing digital inclusivity. Not only can users change the colour contrasts, but they’re also able to choose their own colours for the text and background too if there’s a particular colour that helps them when reading from a screen. It also does a brilliant job at enhancing the digital experience for people who use screen readers as well, so definitely check it out if you’re looking for some inspiration.
Sylvia: John Lewis is another good example! It has the capability for users to navigate solely through a keyboard without the need for a mouse or trackpad. They also use hidden links in their code which are picked up by screen readers that sighted people don’t see.
Sylvia: It might feel daunting to be tasked with finding a balance between being accessible and aesthetic, but in the end, one person’s aesthetic could be another person’s accessibility. For example, a design that uses bold, contrasting colours and a user interface that isn’t busy would be great for accessibility reasons, but could also look more appealing in general (at least to me, anyway!). Aesthetics will always be subjective, so it’s about finding a good balance.
Marietta: Yeah, if there’s been early considerations into how a company’s brand and brand guidelines (colours, icons and fonts) affect digital accessibility, then it’s usually quite easy to find a good balance. However, this isn’t always the case and sometimes you might find you’re working with restrictions so that’s when you have to get creative in order to work around the brand. Getting creative is definitely key.
Sylvia: Events are so helpful. It’s important to remember that you don’t know what you don’t know, so it’s a good idea to go out and talk to as many people and absorb as much information as you can. Even now, I can’t say I know every aspect of digital accessibility, so I still have to make the time to educate myself.
Marietta: Read books, attend conferences, talk to people whenever you can. As Sylvia said, events are a great way to learn as you’ll be having casual conversations with people that you might not have had the chance to meet in your usual day-to-day life. You can try to put yourself in someone else's shoes up to a certain extent, but you can never fully understand what they go through, so as long as you’re talking to new people you’ll always be expanding your knowledge.
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At ASquared, we believe in making digital experiences accessible. Digital accessibility is not only for the benefit of people experiencing a disability, it’s for the benefit of all. We’re so proud that our designers and developers have the skills and experience to create accessible, impactful experiences but, more importantly, the passion and strive to always do better.
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