Last time, we talked about four prioritisation frameworks you can use to tackle accessibility debt. Two of those frameworks required that you know the real-world impact of accessibility issues from the user's perspective.
But how can you evaluate real-world impact? And why would you? Isn't it enough and perhaps easier to just play the compliance game?
By focusing on user impact, you can:
- Fix issues that matter most to your users
- Build a more inclusive and user-friendly product
- Make smarter trade-offs about where to invest your limited time and resources
Accessibility issues range from minor annoyances to major barriers that prevent users from completing tasks. I like to distinguish between two types of user impact:
Functional impact
These are accessibility issues that stop users from completing tasks. Think of forms they can't submit or buttons they can't use.
To put it bluntly, things don't work at all for them in their situation.
Emotional impact
This is when things work, but it's a lot of work for them to make it so.
It leaves them feeling frustrated, stressed and excluded. Think of a long form they completed and then have to scroll all the way to the top of the page to find the button to submit, because it's not properly marked as a button that submits the form.
When you understand how these impact your users, you have a better chance of prioritising fixing the issues that have the biggest effect on their lives.
So how do you find out how issues impact your users?
You ask them.
You need to hear from them directly.
Here are three ways to gather feedback:
- Surveys and interviews. Ask users with disabilities about their experiences. Try to keep questions specific to uncover actionable insights.
- Usability testing. Observe users with disabilities interacting with your product to reveal issues you might not spot otherwise.
- Support tickets. Sometimes, your users will tell you what they can't do and why. Look for recurring problems to gauge impact.
Once you've identified accessibility issues, you want to see how they affect key user journeys in your product. Can they sign up without problems? Can they pay and checkout?
Identify the key user journeys first in your product and then overlay the accessibility issues you uncovered onto these journeys.
You can now make strategic decisions and fix issues that block critical tasks. I have an entire workshop dedicated to just working through user journeys and accessibility issues.
You could use analytics and session recordings to spot accessibility barriers. Tools like heatmaps, click tracking or error logging can help you pinpoint where users are struggling, but there's really no substitute to human-to-human interaction.
Now that you understand the real-world impact of accessibility issues on users and have a way to gather feedback, you can look at the technical side of things, like fix complexity, dependencies and how to avoid unintended consequences.