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Empathise by experience with accessibility
Going further than your alt-tags.
“Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another and feeling with the heart of another.” — Alfred Adler
In the last year as a UX developer, I’ve realised that accessibility on the web is much more important than I initially thought when I was learning about web development in school and university. I’ve been able to study and sit down with users who have completely different needs to me when using a website/app, and it has opened my eyes to the side of websites that the majority of us won’t see (or hear).
I’ve been working in an educational technology startup, and so providing experiences that suit the needs of every student has been a challenge – but it’s been a creative and interesting one.
The biggest part of that challenge has been properly understanding what users with certain accessibility needs go through when using the standard website or app, and then ideating how we can improve that experience to be something that is genuinely pleasant for them. But how can we understand how to improve something if we aren’t truly living through it?
Well, how about we do live through it? How about we restrict ourselves to using our products in the way someone with certain accessibility needs would have to use them?
Then, we can start critically analysing how well our product performs.
Think about these Accessibility Needs
The main accessibility problems we can control (not all of them) are based around vision, hearing and physical navigation. So, let’s break these down and see how we can augment this experience for ourselves — and therefore enable us to think about how we can solve these problems.
Vision/navigation
In a previous post, I detailed how we can design beautiful interfaces for those with accessibility needs, including those suffering from some form of colourblindness. I won’t completely repeat myself here, but a struggle that is faced is…
