Why am I so passionate about improving digital accessibility? The short answer to this question is that it can significantly improve the lives of people with disabilities. This became clear to me once again by a specific situation in my own circle of friends and acquaintances.
Illness brings sadness and a sense of helplessness
Yesterday I spoke to an acquaintance who has recently been diagnosed with an eye condition that is causing his vision to deteriorate steadily. He can now only see vague shadows or outlines, and in the centre of his field of vision there is nothing but a black spot. He has reached a respectable age, is still very active in community life and takes a keen interest in current affairs. He therefore uses the internet on his computer, smartphone and tablet every day, amongst other things to read interesting blogs and to manage banking matters for himself and his wife. The fact that he can now do this only with great difficulty, if at all, makes him feel very sad and helpless.
Digital accessibility tools
During our conversation, I explained what I do and that his devices contain tools that can help him read and navigate websites and apps. Instead of looking at and reading the screen, he can have the text read aloud using free, built-in screen readers. In his case, these are Narrator for his Windows computer and TalkBack for his Android smartphone and tablet. For others who use Apple devices, it’s VoiceOver. He’d already discovered for himself how to zoom in on the screen and that he can operate his smartphone using an AI voice assistant, but these screen readers are new to him.
It isn’t strictly part of my job to explain to people how these screen readers work, and he’ll soon be receiving help with that from the hospital. However, I did want to give him a taste of what a screen reader can do. So I grabbed a laptop and asked him what he’d like to be able to do again. The first thing that sprang to mind was that he enjoys reading blogs on a particular news website, so he can keep up to date with current affairs. Together we tried to get there, but we also discovered that it wasn’t all that straightforward.
Accessibility issues on websites
In my work, I regularly use a screen reader to find out what it reads out on a web page I’m testing. As a result, I’ve become used to the fact that, as a user, you hear a great deal of information. For him, however, this was new and very overwhelming. He also had to get used to the key combinations needed to start or stop the screen reader and to navigate around the computer and the website. For him, this meant having to learn where each key is located on the keyboard.
Once on the website, on every page we first had to go through a whole host of links at the top, such as the logo, a search box, links to social media and the main menu. Sometimes we were given too much information about a link, and sometimes too little. For example, with the search box, the screen reader only announced that it was a field you could type into, but not what the field was for. There was also no way on this website to skip all these links. He could, however, potentially use a keyboard shortcut to go to the first heading on the page, but to do so he first had to know which key on his keyboard to use. The heading structure on this website wasn’t very logical either, which meant this wasn’t actually a very practical method. He eventually managed to read the blog posts, but the process was certainly not smooth. As an accessibility consultant, I was immediately able to identify a few areas for improvement on this specific website, which could at least make the experience a little more pleasant.
Similar situations involving inaccessible websites
This experience is similar to a situation I encountered about 8 years ago with a former colleague, and which was one of the reasons I decided to dig deeper into the subject of digital accessibility. This colleague also had a visual impairment and used several assistive technologies to enable him to carry out his office job at a computer. He would sometimes grumble about these assistive technologies, as they didn’t always work properly. What he didn’t realise at the time, however, was that this wasn’t down to the assistive technologies themselves, but to the websites and programmes he was using. These hadn’t been designed and programmed in a way that allowed the assistive technologies to work with them effectively.
So has nothing changed in terms of digital accessibility?
Apparently, similar problems still occur, which is, of course, a shame. Yet I’m not discouraged by this, because I do see significant progress in the right direction in several areas. For example, government organisations and banks have become much more accessible in recent years. However, digital accessibility remains an issue that must be constantly taken into account. If it is incorporated as early as possible into the design, development and content of websites and apps, then I certainly believe this need no longer be a problem.
The development of generative AI systems is a key factor here. These are increasingly being integrated, for example to enable the faster creation of new websites, apps and content. If digital accessibility isn’t properly taken into account in this process, it could lead to a deterioration in accessibility. If, on the other hand, digital accessibility is properly incorporated, it could actually lead to websites, apps and content improving rapidly. Let’s hope for the latter.
Digital accessibility isn’t just for people with visual impairments
Digital accessibility is often associated with people who are blind or visually impaired. The situation described on this page naturally relates to that too. Yet digital accessibility affects many more people. Think of someone who is deaf or hard of hearing and cannot follow a video without subtitles; someone with a speech impairment who struggles with phone calls and voice assistants; someone with a motor impairment who cannot operate a mouse or press small buttons; or someone with concentration difficulties who struggles to read text whilst there is all sorts of other movement on the screen. A digitally accessible website or app can make it easier for all these people to do things that others might take for granted, and that’s something I’m happy to commit to.
Featured image by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash. The person pictured is not the person I spoke to.