Inclusion first: How to make your product accessible and inclusive
Do you want your product to be more accessible and inclusive but aren’t sure where to start? If you design or build digital products and solutions, deciding where and how to start making them more accessible and inclusive is often the hardest part. This guide will help you take the next step no matter where you are on the journey.
What is accessibility vs. inclusion?
Accessibility is building for people with disabilities, and inclusion is building for all.
You can think of accessibility and inclusion within product development as a spectrum. On the far left of the spectrum, the team has little to no training or awareness of building accessible products/websites. In the middle, the team is trained on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and the product is meeting legally required accessibility compliance standards for web and digital. At the right end of the spectrum, the team follows a robust, inclusive product development process, where the solution is designed and built for all users.
The team has methods to identify and measure success for underserved user groups and bring them in as co-creators of the product or solution.
As an organization or team, you need to know where you are on the spectrum to know where to start. It is most effective and impactful to consider accessibility and inclusion from the beginning of solution development. However, many products already exist that aren’t accessible or inclusive, and for those, we need to find reasonable starting points for change.
Why is it important?
First and foremost, it is the proper thing to do. From an ethics perspective, we should enable everyone to participate equitably in the products and experiences we create. It shows you care about the user and want them to be successful.
Building accessible products and solutions can greatly impact business outcomes as people with disabilities and their family members account for a large percentage of the population. According to the C.D.C., 61 million adults in the United States live with a disability. Twenty-six percent (1 in 4) of adults in the United States have some type of disability. According to W.H.O., “about 15% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability, of whom 2–4% experience significant difficulties in functioning.”
The Rod Group estimates that the spending power of people with disabilities, friends, and family is over 13 Trillion.
Haben Girma, the first Deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School, stated:
“Don’t assume what people with disabilities can or can’t do. Just assume that they will use your service or product and design it to be accessible by everyone.”
Considering the needs of more diverse users drives innovation, as many solutions originally designed and built for people with disabilities are beneficial to everyone.
The law protects people living with disabilities. The Americans with Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) prohibits discrimination and guarantees that people with disabilities have equal access to the mainstream of American life, including employment, purchases, and participation in state and local government services and programs.
Also, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was amended to require federal agencies to make electronic and information technology (E.I.T.) accessible to individuals with disabilities. The law (29 U.S.C. § 794 (d)) applies to all Federal agencies when developing, procuring, maintaining, or using electronic and information technology. Under Section 508, agencies must give disabled employees and members of the public access to information comparable to the access available to others.
Building for Accessibility
Accessibility means building for people with disabilities. Fortunately, accessibility guidelines and legal requirements are well-defined, long-standing, and don’t often change. This allows teams to train up and apply accessibility standards consistently over time.
It is far less effort if you design and build for accessibility from the beginning. However, even if your product/website exists, you can start building for accessibility at any time with new features/pages. The following approach will guide your way.
Step 1: Advocate, build empathy and gain prioritization.
Suppose your team/organization is currently on the left side of the spectrum. In that case, the first step is to advocate for prioritizing accessibility. Without buy-in and involvement from user experience, product, and engineering leadership, it will be challenging to progress.
Don’t wait for someone else to lead the way. I have often seen the tide change because an individual or small group of passionate people spread awareness and educated others on the importance of designing and building for people with disabilities.
Tips
- Use the “Why it’s important” data to back up your case. These points provide both legal and business rationale on why accessibility is important.
- Build empathy — identify users of your product with disabilities that struggle with the current solution and share their frustrations (be sure to protect their privacy). Exposing these stories is one of the most compelling ways to drive change. If you can’t find users of your own product easily, then finding related stories may be powerful; Google and Microsoft have some such stories.
- If you can’t get the full team’s buy-in immediately, start with what you can control. For example, suppose you are a designer. In that case, you can ensure your designs are fully compliant through the appropriate use of color, color contrast, consistent navigation, etc. — Avinash Kaur’s article, Accessibility for UX Designers, has some clear examples. If you are a developer, you can ensure your code is accessible and share best practices with peers. If you are a product manager, you can prioritize accessibility for your product or features.
- Host a low-effort event, such as a Lunch and Learn, to bring awareness and identify others passionate about Accessibility.
Leading by example and starting small will lead to progress. Don’t be discouraged if change doesn’t happen immediately.
Step 2: Make a plan
If you are building your product from the ground up, you can skip to step 3.
If your product or website already exists and is not accessible, you will want to identify a path forward. If you are unsure if your product is accessible, here are some simple checks you can do. There are multiple ways to approach getting to a fully accessible solution, but they generally fall into two categories:
One fell swoop: With this approach, you pause other work and take time to make the necessary changes to make it accessible. This is the fastest way to make a product accessible.
Phased approach: It may not be feasible to pause and dedicate the full team’s attention to accessibility at one time. In that case, a phased approach will be necessary where you tackle each part of the product in sequence. A good place to start is either with new features and functionality or by prioritizing the most critical user pathways (i.e., purchase paths, help and support).
Step 3: Train the team
Training and education around accessibility guidelines is the most important step. It’s critical that product team members are very familiar with the accessibility requirements, user experience, and engineers in particular. These requirements are long-standing and rarely change — it is a one-time investment in the team’s growth and product value.
W3C and Google offer some great resources:
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
- Accessibility Fundamentals
- Accessibility for Teams
- Web Accessibility Course
- Material Design Accessibility Guidelines
- Designing for Global Accessibility
Step 4: Repeatable Process
Once the team is trained, and the product is accessible, it takes ongoing effort and planning to maintain accessibility when new features and functionality are built.
A pitfall that teams can fall into is putting in a lot of effort at one time to get the product to be accessible but not investing in the process changes needed to maintain accessibility, which over time results in erasing the hard work.
You will want to establish a repeatable process for designing, building, and testing for accessibility on an ongoing basis. Ask yourself these questions and create processes to ensure they are happening:
- How will you ensure new team members are trained on building for accessibility?
- How will you ensure product designs are accessible? (i.e., update style guide, create repeatable components, include alt tag guidelines with all designs)
- How will you bring users with disabilities into the design and development process to ensure you are truly meeting their needs?
- How will you test each feature before it launches to ensure accessibility?
Once your product is accessible, it’s a good time to think about building for inclusion. I suggest starting with accessibility because many teams may find it daunting to take on both at one time. However, it’s absolutely possible and encouraged to build for inclusion alongside accessibility.
Building for Inclusion
Inclusion is about building for all. We must acknowledge that this is hard. Building products for all users is an aspiration and perhaps a never-ending path. However, the pursuit of this path is worthwhile and necessary.
Many of the strategies discussed above to build for accessibility, such as Step 1 and Step 4, also apply to building for inclusion.
Additionally, some well-accepted strategies exist to build for inclusion:
Identify underserved users
Because unique user groups may require different features, functionality or other considerations, it’s a good idea to identify key underserved user groups that are relevant to your product as a starting point. People with disabilities represent one key group. If your product is used globally, you may want to consider specific international user groups with unique needs, such as new internet users. You can use market data, your own product analytics, or user research to identify user groups to prioritize first in your journey towards inclusion.
Design with, not for
Including the users you are designing for in the product development process is an important element to truly consider their needs and preferences.
The book Mismatch, by Kat Holmes, offers these and many more practical approaches to designing for varied user needs:
Design for extremes
- In the pursuit of design for all, considering users’ with unique needs often drives innovation.
- For example, the first typewriter was invented by Pellegrino Turri in the early 1800s for his blind friend Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano so she could more easily write letters. Designing for extremes often leads to leaps in innovation and enhanced solutions for all users.
Provide alternatives, rather than separate experiences
- Provide alternative ways to interact to accomplish the same goal versus one fixed way to interact. Consider multiple modes of input, customization, adaptation, etc.
- For example, many accessibility requirements enable multiple modes of interaction for a digital experience through assistive technology, such as screen readers for people with visual impairments and Sip and Puff devices for people with motor impairments.
The journey towards an inclusive product doesn’t have to be overwhelming or all-encompassing. Find the right starting point for your product and team and make a commitment to stay on the path.
Call for feedback
I welcome feedback, please feel free to share in the comments or directly.
About the author
As a Senior User Experience Manager at Google, Mandy leads the user experience team responsible for Customer Help at Google. Accessibility is top of mind when her team designs solutions to enable users to solve Google product issues and educational needs. Over the past 20 years, Mandy has led UX design and strategy crafting product solutions for a diverse set of users and industries: VMware, AT&T/Cricket Wireless, Leo Burnett, Motorola and more. Mandy also serves on the Advisory Board for Spa Space, where she provides UX guidance enabling Spa Space to disrupt the spa industry.
Recently, Mandy spoke on a panel focused on building Accessible products for LIKE Ventures’ Accessibility Conference of Technology. LIKE Ventures promotes the utilization of innovative technology to increase parity and improve the quality of life for people with disabilities.
About the artist
Georgia Webber is a comics artist, editor, and facilitator living in southern Ontario. She is entirely occupied by the intersection of health and art, making music, comics, and facilitating courses from this point of fascination.
Georgia is best known for her debut graphic memoir, Dumb: Living Without a Voice (Fantagraphics 2018), the chronicle of her severe vocal injury and sustained vocal condition which causes her pain from using her voice. This difficult experience lead her to work as a Cranial Sacral Therapist, a meditation facilitator, and as an improvising musician, blending elements of healthcare, body awareness and creative expression within constraints. She has extended her love of the voice into the community with a project called MAW Vocal Arts. To learn more about Georgia’s work, visit www.georgiawebber.com.
More Resources
If you want to learn more, there are so many inspiring and helpful resources out there on this topic. Here are a few to get you started:
