What is Digital Accessibility?
Digital accessibility is about designing and developing digital products that can be used by everyone, ensuring you are not excluding people based on visual, hearing, or cognitive and motor impairments. It is about ensuring your design and content is clear and simple enough, so that most of your users can use it without needing to adapt it, while supporting your users that need to adapt how they access or use it.
Disability is context dependant. The accessibility of a website or mobile app is not confined to users with permanent disabilities; it extends to users experiencing temporary or situational disabilities or impairments. For example, a person might have one arm (permanent), a broken arm (temporary) or be carrying a child (situational).
Image: Microsoft Design’s Inclusive Design toolkit
An accessible digital product places the user at the core of the experience. By focusing on accessibility, it improves usability for everyone.
Why is it important?
In any industry, winning and retaining customer loyalty is key to success. With research showing that 71% of disabled users will leave a website if they find it difficult to use and the Government estimating the spending power of disabled people at £249bn, not offering an accessible experience can equate to a huge loss for businesses.
By considering accessibility early in the development of your product, you can identify issues before it reaches maturity, thereby saving time and money whilst maximising the potential reach of the product and offering an inclusive user experience enhancing your brand’s reputation.
Not only does an accessible website improve the digital experience for everyone, it can help to mitigate risk. If a user can’t access a digital service due to a disability, it’s potentially breaching the Equality Act 2010 or the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (in Northern Ireland). Building on these obligations, new government legislation now means that all public sector websites and mobile applications need to achieve specific accessibility standards.
Unified Accessibility Testing
We can help you to understand the needs of people with disabilities and show you how to ensure your product is digitally accessible, usable and complies with current legislation.
Our web accessibility service covers the following areas:
WCAG Compliance Audit: A comprehensive assessment of your product against success criteria based on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 – the industry recognised standards for building accessible applications for the web.
Assistive Technology Testing: To ensure you are covering a broad range of end users, it’s crucial that your user journeys are checked on a range of assistive technologies, such as screen readers or speech recognition software. Our device lab is equipped with the most popular technologies and is defined to the meet GDS standards.
Disabled User Testing: Invaluable feedback from real users. Delivered in partnership with the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), we recruit people with a range of accessibility requirements, including visual, motor or cognitive impairments to test your website or mobile application.
Accessibility Workshops: Bespoke and interactive, our workshops demonstrate how the use of accessible and inclusive design can help overcome many of the barriers those with physical and cognitive impairments may experience on a daily basis.
Accessibility Strategy: Our consultancy is built around the needs of your business. Using our industry knowledge and experience, we can help you in areas such as identifying the best test approach for your business or how to define an internal accessibility policy.
Accessibility Best Practice
As a member of the IAAP (International Association of Accessibility Professionals), we aim to promote and improve awareness of accessibility across the web. The IAAP is a network of accessibility professionals from around the world that come together to improve the accessibility profession through networking, education and certification.
Accessibility testing should be considered at various stages in the development process.
Design: Visual elements have a huge impact on how accessible your website is. Your choice of colour palette alone may lead to failures. It’s best to capture any issues early before you embark on a full build.
Build: We can assess the code and structure of your website to ensure it meets recognised standards and best practices. Building your site in the right way behind the scenes will ensure that it can be used and understood correctly when users are utilising assistive technologies such as screen readers.
Release: Even the content of your website can affect how accessible your application is. Copy and images must all be created with accessibility standards in mind.
