'Accessibility design in user experience and digital product design: Ethical and practical Imperatives

Abstract

Accessibility (a11y) in digital product design makes software, applications, web apps, and other digital interactive products usable for a diverse human audience. Creating digital products that everyone can use is essential for companies and users. For companies, it means establishing a wider audience for their product and conceptually increasing profits. For users, interacting with fully accessible products means that, regardless of being temporarily or permanently disabled, you can still perform all the tasks within a product without issue.There are rules and guidelines like the Americans with Disabilities Act [ADA] and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [WCAG] that outline what digital products must do in order to be considered accessible. As user experience [UX] practitioners, we must challenge and change the common practice and paradigm of companies using the cost of action and avoidance of responsibility as excuses to neglect accessibility. The goal for everyone building digital products should be to shift the focus from creating a ‘product that people with disabilities can engage with’ to creating products for all people, emphasizing that designing for the extremes benefits everyone. When creating new digital products, there is no excuse not to include accessibility from the start. However, there are barriers to getting there. With existing digital products, there is a cost in adding accessibility into code where it doesn’t currently exist. Updating the code is called “refactoring” and takes engineering resources to perform. However, every digital product must be accessible. One does not have to look far to find news articles about corporations facing legal troubles because their digital product is not up to accessibility standards. In the early 2000s, the concept of “responsive design” emerged. A responsive product is the idea that one design could adapt when displayed on different screens to allow one codebase to control multiple views of the same product. Before this idea, a mobile product would need to be created and maintained, as well as a desktop application. At first, responsive products were considered an afterthought and sold as an “add-on” to make maintaining digital products easier. In current practice, responsive design is just how good products are built. Even when a digital product starts as a mobile application, it is (or should be) developed to be responsive for 1: all mobile form factors, and 2: in the future, the product can be utilized in other sizes, like a desktop or web application.Companies and people creating products should think about accessibility first. Accessibility design should be part of the modern baseline for starting and developing all digital products. Through education and visual references, all user experience practitioners must be familiar with accessibility standards as a practice to advocate that all creators of digital products start with accessibility design. We want to break down the barriers to “thinking accessibly.” Our field's responsibility is to advocate and push companies to do the right thing from the beginning. Through working cross-team, we intend to support our developer friends in including accessibility from the start and educate them when code is not up to accessibility standards.