Discover the power of accessibility audits, a comprehensive review ensuring products are inclusive and usable by all. Dive into this technique in the Product Thinking Playbook, as we touch on when to apply it, best practices and what role responsibilities look like in your product development journey.
Reviewing the accessibility of a product or design. Methods include manual and automated accessibility testing as well as usability testing with individuals possessing a variety of impairments.
To ensure a product is inclusive and as usable as possible by everyone, including people with a range of disabilities or impairments. Identified accessibility improvements are added into the product backlog for Accessibility Implementation. Accessibility audits are also conducted to ensure the product is legally compliant with required business or industry standards.
- Immersion: Right from the start, we should understand the work that has been done in regards to accessibility, and the current state of accessibility within the product. Look at any business research or user data that may exist and how it pertains to the vast user base and their needs.
- User Research: Having a variety of needs represented in the user testing base. Instead of thinking of the type of disability, group users by the type of needs they have for their product (keyboard use, captions, voice to text, etc.)
- Technical Research: Audit and investigate if there are technical limitations to making the product accessible.
- UX Design: Results from the accessibility audit should be used for future UX design considerations.
- Visual Design: Audit the brand/product’s design system ensuring contrast requirements are met. Results from the audit should be used for the future visual designs.?
- Product Testing: Testing the product against WCAG 2.1AA standards
- Delivery Program Planning: Results from the audit should be used when creating the backlog. Writing accessibility focused user stories, or including accessible functionality within new features moving forward.
- When testing, there are two ways of doing it: automated and manual
- It is not the accessibility audit’s job to tell you how to fix or resolve something, its job is to identify the issue or error.
- Consider if the target audience may have a higher likelihood for certain impairments (new parents having only one hand, elderly community having vision impairment etc.)
- Have an inclusive user group for research.
- Product Manager/Strategist: ensuring that accessibility audit is completed
- Product Designer: reviewing the current design systems against the WCAG 2.1 AA Criteria?
- Software Engineer: Reviewing the code base for capabilities and limitations with regards to supporting assistive technology. Conducting manual and automated testing to audit the product.
- QA Engineer: manual and automated testing to complete the audit
Some online tools/platforms/services
Our Product Thinking Playbook is filled with tactics and techniques that help product teams build better products. Click here to download your copy of the complete playbook, and stay tuned as we share more from it in the coming weeks.
