Hi folks, I’ve been asked a lot over the years about where to get started with digital accessibility. My standard answer is keyboard. Good keyboard navigation is the foundation (IMHO) to accessibility, as so many things rely on it.
But I wanted to go a bit further and share an order of learning and focus, without saying any one area is more important than any other. But I feel working up from the foundation is the area that might have the most impact for development teams. Usability is the North Star that all the others contribute to.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do you think this would be a useful visual heuristic to display or reference? Do you think there are any fundamental flaws with it? Good or bad, criticism or helpful feedback, I’d like to hear it all. Thanks
Right now, I spend around 1 hour a day looking at a phone on average, I spend a bit more than that looking at either my satnav which is trying to get me around all the potholes and emergency road closures. And then finally spend a fair chunk of my day looking at 2 high resolution screens. The first 2 use cases however matter more to me, they are for me, still new and novel. While sitting in an office now and typing into a big screen, where time stands still for a bit longer is a different emotional state to the portable computing experience.
In my car case, there really is no keyboard, the one that is there is by design-omissions galore, terrible. And so the keyboard is only used if absolutely needed. Anyone who had a satnav 30 years ago will know how responsive UI can induce road-rage even before you start the engine. I can see where keyboard comes in. But today keyboard is not used and will be used less and less not because it is terrible, and here is my key point that is missing from the nice chart. Safety.
Accessibility is and always has been about safety in one way or another, and for me that fits in at your sea-glass green layer. I struggle a lot to see the car console while driving since I am far-sighted. Lucky for me the consoles are often quite big and I do not need to switch from my driving eyes to my reading eyes. It has always been about safety. My world has changed, and mobile computing is just more interesting than boring desktop use-cases. Yesterday I stopped in at our corner shop, and chatted to a pensioner I know. Suzanne struggles a moment with her phone while talking to another friend about when the next committee meeting and when the next Tea morning is happening. She and her friends do not all have, or if they do, they do not use their desktop computers to read emails. Mobile is my new “barrier”. Now all I need to do is get VW to move the damn headlight main switch to not require really long arms.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. You make some interesting points.
I agree that in-car SatNavs are not really designed for keyboard interactions, as their primary use case these days tends to be voice inputs. That said, if a non-driver was navigating using their phone, whether connected or not, and needed to use a screen reader, then keyboard navigation would definitely be imperative. The same would apply to someone using navigation on foot in an unfamiliar place.
I would be interested to hear more about what you mean here. I do agree that safety is a big part of digital accessibility, but I’m not sure how my triangle relates to your point, or what you mean by the “sea-green” layer? I say that as I don’t think safety falls under only one of the areas in the triangle, unless as part of the North Star, as in Usability and Safety. Rather, it is an overarching outcome of good digital accessibility, similar to security and inclusion.
Interesting. I agree with Usability being the top, not sure about the rest though. It currently feels like ranking people’s access needs.
Maybe this needs to be a little more complex? I’m thinking about a pyramid with sections, because for each barrier type there are important and less important topics. In my old company we had accessibility release blockers focusing on different areas. WCAG already has a ranking system with the A, AA, AAA levels so you could base it on that.
I tried to sketch my idea with AI, not perfect, but hopefully gets the idea across.
Accessibility pyramid diagram with 4 levels. At the top is ‘Usability’. Below it are three horizontal levels, each divided into four columns representing Motor, Vision, Hearing, and Cognition.
As I get older, I have taken things like web-accessibility and thought about them in terms of just plain getting older. A few examples: When you get older text has to be bigger, and use of colours clearer. Scrolling is also no a replacement for bloated navigation. So I find that being able to do all of these things either by voice command or via a boiled-down UI is actually a way to remove barriers to old people most of all. I had also not thought about the use-case for a “less-abled” person being my navigator. Which is just dumb of me because once a year I have a disabled navigator and we drive for 12 hours solid , and it’s always a snag point that a less-able person will struggle with a phone-satnav in the passenger seat of a car.
I really want the sea-glass green “Physical and Motor” to also cover safety. For not just satnav, but also media players and things like messaging apps that people typically also use “on the-go”.
nice AI diagram, wow. Yes, this is where I also think I was heading. A bit overly busy, but shows how useful a computer with a brain the size of a refrigerator can be. All visualizations are valid if they show us something new.
So after reading the post again this is about getting into accessibility as in a learning path
In this case I agree that keyboard navigation is a good place to start. Maybe the pyramid threw me. While calling keyboard a foundation resonates with that image, I’m not so sure about the other points. For example screen readers are something I would also suggest for later, but it’s a bit of a bigger topic and I wouldn’t want a pyramid to suggest it’s not that important. Are there any graph types that work better for journeys?
For getting into accessibility as a whole and not just the testing methods learning about the why is also an important foundation. And to safety I would also add security. There was a good talk at AgileTD this year about the overlap. I think there is a lot of overlap with different topics. Usability is already in the picture.
In my understanding, those mimic mouse or joystick signals or movements, which, in my experience, are generally accessible to a person who can use them. For example, someone who can use a trackball, which is essentially an upside down mouse (when they had actual balls in them) can generally use a mouse.
As with many visuals or heuristics, there isn’t room for everything. As voice commands are turned into text for processing, and I’ve not specifically called out inputs, that could be covered under the North Star of usability. That’s a great point to call out, as I’ll be doing a write-up on this at some point, so that is something to think about how to include.
Thank you for your replies and your imagining of a triangle, or pyramid.
As a little more context to my thoughts. I took my initial response of where to start, keyboard navigation, when someone asked me, and thought what would I say next.
My thought process included the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, what would affect the most people, and what technically underpins other parts of accessibility. I wanted to take the perspective of what a team who wants to learn or improve their accessibility knowledge would find useful.
It made sense to me that I should think about the most number of people an area would affect, again not saying any area is more important than another. So after keyboard, what and how you see something made the most sense. Physical and motor access sit with keyboard under operability. Visual and low vision made sense next, then screen reader or auditor support.
So the idea is that teams would start at the foundation and work their way up the triangle. I’m also thinking that pyramid or hierarchy might be a better name. Safety and security will definitely be included in the write up.
@AdyStokes, I am not an accessibility expert, so take this with a grain of salt. I’m wondering if, in regard to the visual, a wagon wheel might be more helpful? A11y to me feels like more of a goal to complete (one spoke isn’t really complete without the other in terms of a wheel) vs a triangle, where it appears some parts are more important than others.
Honestly, I see the triangle and think of the US food pyramid, which probably every US citizen ignores, so that’s my first initial response. This could reflect my personal bias more than anything.
A wagon wheel, or something like Anna’s version, is really useful if you want to present a range of subjects on a topic for consideration, but that is not my goal here. Although I do like a good wagon wheel or pie visual, so I might just make a note for future ideas.
I’m trying to describe a journey for an individual or team to build up accessibility, starting with keyboard and building it up through the others until they reach a peak of usability. Hope that makes sense.
