The Product Thinking Playbook Explained: Accessibility Implementation

In an increasingly diverse digital landscape, creating products that are accessible to all users is essential. Accessibility should be top of mind throughout the entire lifecycle, from product validation to delivery.?

In this blog on the Accessibility Implementation Technique card from our Product Thinking Playbook, Mackenzie Dysart , Client Delivery Principal, and Senior Technical Program Manager, dives into how teams can elevate their product's inclusivity to meet global standards and user expectations.

What is Accessibility Implementation?

Accessibility implementation encompasses a few things, including:?

• Leveraging design and development best practices to build a more inclusive and accessible product.?
• Defining accessibility requirements and specifications and following design and development best practices ensures a more diverse group of users can use your products.?

• Keeping usability and accessibility in mind through all phases ensures you design, build and deliver an inclusive product.

Why would product teams do it?

At Thoughtworks, we strive to build better products, and that means products for all. That includes people with disabilities, age-related conditions, low literacy, and low-tech literacy. According to the World Health Organization, 15% of the world’s population (or 1 in 7 people) has challenges with basic tasks and interactions.?

According to Statistics Canada, over 30% of Canadians will have some form of disability by the time they retire. The American Institute for Research has determined that there are 20 million US working-age adults, roughly 35%, who report at least one disability. In fact, working-age adults who have a disability represent a market share of approximately $490 billion USD.

Their friends and families add another 3.4 billion potential consumers who act on their emotional connection to Persons with Disabilities (PWD). Together, they control over $13 trillion in annual disposable income.?

There are many kinds of disabilities, from temporary to situational to permanent. To build accessible products, it is important for us to understand the ways in which these different groups might use them. People interact with technology in different ways based on their needs and capabilities. It’s important that the products we deliver support all users and their assistive technology needs.

Digital accessibility standards are set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), who have published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Currently, most legislation maps to WCAG 2.1 AA, and they are currently working towards the release of WCAG 2.2.

When should product teams apply it??

Accessibility should be top of mind throughout the entire lifecycle from product validation to delivery. While not an exhaustive list of activities below, be sure to keep accessibility considerations in mind at every step of product building, from prototyping to quality assurance.

• Prototyping: Making sure that user flows or interactions can be accessible within the design even if the functionality does not exist yet. You don’t want to build/design yourself into an inaccessible corner.
• UX Design: Incorporating in your process that you are designing for all users. Think about the different ways people will interact with the product. How will a keyboard user interact? How will someone using voice-to-text fill in the form?
• Visual Design: Ensuring designs meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards
• Delivery Program Planning: When writing user stories, ensure that Accessibility requirements for each feature are outlined in the acceptance criteria. Accessibility should not be an afterthought but part of how it is initially delivered.
• Agile Development: Ensuring accessibility-related improvements and tasks are included in the backlog and a priority during development.?
• Product Testing: Having representation from assistive technology users in the identified user groups and testing the product with respect to accessibility requirements. This should be done both with automated and manual testing.
• Quality Assurance: Automated and manual testing should be conducted to validate if the product meets accessibility requirements.

Who is required?

It is everyone's responsibility to uphold accessibility in their roles and acknowledge its importance. Here are just a few examples of how implementing practices might look for some roles on a product development team.

• Product Manager: Ensuring that accessibility is part of the backlog, included in user stories’ acceptance criteria.
• Product Strategist: Ensuring all users are represented in personas and considering assistive technologies when providing recommendations and conducting research.
• Design Researcher: Conducting research with users who may use assistive technologies, looking into best practices for user needs.
• Product Designer: Ensuring designs meet WCAG requirements and functionality considerations are made when handing them off to the engineering team.
• Software Developer: building to meet WCAG requirements and building to support assistive technologies.
• QA Developer: manual and automated testing to ensure the product is inclusive and meets WCAG standards.

How do I do it? (Best Practices):?

• Shift left: Accessibility and inclusivity should be at the forefront throughout the life cycle of the project. The sooner we discuss it, the “cheaper” it is to implement.?
• Necessary for the Definition of Done: We must shift our thinking from compliance/bug fixing to accessibility being part of the features’ definition of done (DoD).
• Uphold high standards: WCAG 2.1 AA is the standard we should strive for.
• Be inclusive from the get-go: Have an inclusive user group for product research and testing by including appropriate screener questions and communicating the appropriate criteria during recruitment for users.

• Progress over perfection: Remember that progress is more important than perfection. Keep working towards inclusive and usable products.

Tools:

Online tools/platforms/services

• Deque's Axe dev tools
• Chrome's wave plugin automated testing tool?
• Fable - User testing

Websites

• 2.1AA Quick Guide
• Fable
• Site improve
• Deque
• Level access
• Government of UK

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.