Communicating accessibility as needs to be met and not rules to be followed

A true story.

Photo by davisuko on Unsplash

My company wants to redesign a web page. The page is a mess and we’re trying to start from scratch the right way.

One of the Business Analysts (BA) who writes the requirements contacted me because she had an accessibility question. She showed me a step indicator like this one:

This is taken from the US Web Design System website, which is a UI framework designed by a collaboration of alphabet soup US government agencies. The one on the linked page also has text below it which reads “3 of 5 Supporting documents”; but the step indicator the BA showed me didn’t have any such text.

The web page my company wants to redesign is a long form with several steps. This step indicator is supposed to communicate to the user where they are in the process, what has been completed, and what steps remain.

Now, the step indicator she showed me used a bright, green color to indicate a completed step, a dark blue color to indicate the current step, and a light gray color to indicate a future (not started) step. All of this was on a white background.

First, I suggested a darker green and a darker gray. She tried them out and was pleased to see it looked better. Nice!

Then, I said we needed to include some other indication of the progress besides the color. She asked me what I meant.

“You can’t use color as the only means to communicate information,” I replied.

I could tell this wasn’t what she wanted to hear. But I also realized I just recited a compliance standard… and it came out so easily — it was almost a kneejerk reaction. I successfully conveyed what the standard was; but I failed in one very important aspect: I spoke of compliance and not accessibility.

Compliance is a checklist, accessibility is about people.

If she or anyone else on my team comes to me with an accessibility question and my answer is always something like “No, we can’t do that because Success Criterion so-and-so states such-and-such”, not only will they come to despise me, they’ll come to despise accessibility.