Usability testing with disabled users is a good investment

I was speaking about “alt text” all the way back in the early 90’s. I’m still raising awareness about that. Like many other accessibility professionals, I love to get beyond the basics. I’m regularly asked by designers to review a design or a concept. They ask me “can we make this WCAG conformant?”. That is the wrong question to ask.

The right question

The right question to ask is: “Can we make this accessible?”.

The work we do is much more than about merely meeting one accessibility standard or the other. The Web Content Accessibilitiy Guidelines (WCAG) are the starting point of accessibility, not the target. This is true with any other accessibility standard. We need to stop just thinking about standards conformance. We need to think accessibility, especially when we reach more complex patterns. It becomes particulalry important when we want to use really unusual patterns.

It’s all about the implementation

I must drive some designers up the wall. My answer typically is “it depends on how we implement it”, when they ask if their design is going to work.

There are things we can tell outright are not going to work. We can probably find a way to massage the implementation of other things into standards conformance. But having all the right ingredients doesn’t mean the recipe will taste good. Using the right elements in the right way as to make it conform to the standards will not ensure an accessible experience.

Usability testing with disabled users

This point is driven home nearly every time I conduct a usability test with disabled users. They experience barriers, even when we fixed all accessibility barriers found during auditing.

Almost every time I end up saying to the designer: “I wish we could do functional prototypes and have disabled users test them”. That would give us the real answer as to whether or not something is accessible.

European Accessibility Act

As it happens, the European Accessibility Act requires things to work for disabled people. It does not require things to conform to a specific accessibility standard. So we should use the standards, such as WCAG, to guide our work. But we must make sure what we design and build actually works for disabled folks.

Usability testing - Just do it!

You can “roll your own” usability test with disabled users, call on small outfits like Canadian Easy Surf, hire a nonprofit like Access Works by Knowbility, or go for an enterprise-grade outfit like Fable.

What’s important is to ensure you test your products with disabled users. I guarantee you that you will gain insights about your product’s accessibility.

I’ve been doing accessibility work for a Very Long Time, and conducting usability studies with disabled users for about 15 years. I learn something new almost every time!