For the benefit of worldwide readers - the European Accessibility Act affects companies within the European Union, not the entire continent of Europe!
Ie the UK is not directly impacted unless companies do business within the EU. Users in the UK will of course benefit from initiatives implemented on EU websites and should see accessibility given more prominence
I totally respect how much work that went into accessibility described in your article.
We’ve always been dictated to by our contractual obligations, bearing in mind our UI products are not public facing. A few years, we had those WCAG 2.1 AA obligations written into a contract and we went through 4 kind of levels of testing.
Automated assessment through Axe
Screen reading checks
Subjective assessment as to whether a page was accessible
A referral to an accessibility testing centre (one off)
For delivery of the contract, it was enough to get through. The lessons learned were built into our dev design system, so thanks to that contract we’re certainly better than we were.
However, the frustration is 2 years on from those contracts, we still have the testing infrastructure but no longer the contractual obligation. So we raise any issues we find, but they sit in backlogs deprioritised if they’re not critical non-compliances. I have however, shared my concerns on the EAA and we do try and champion fixing any outstanding accessibility issues.
Empathy lab sounds awesome. We invite people in who use the tools as part of daily life to give feedback on some of our apps.
It is still a challenging area for me, we can use all the tools and make an app compliant and tick those boxes but still in testing those tools like talkback I sometimes feel my usage and navigation dont quite feel like how a real user would optimise flows etc.
One of the things I have been thinking about is that there is likely still a lot we can learn from users with different ways of using the applications, do we add a lot of visual fluff in our standard flows for example, perhaps there are lessons in streamlining flows from different users.
We often do not consider should we have a toggle for example that strips down functional features depending on optimisation for different users.
Slightly linked to this, I was discussing global websites recently, we were looking at decluttering until someone pointed out that in some places the users actual want clutter. So internationalisation was not just a language aspect but much deeper than that, adding clutter for some localisation for example seems odd for many.
I suspect there is a deeper aspect that also impacts accessibility where we need to learn or re-learn different users and maybe in the same we add localisation features we could toggle apps for different accessibility needs.
I’d be interested if anyone has done studies in this or has build custom variation into there apps depending users accessibility preference.
