this is the neelen Norman group ux [Music] podcast I'm theres fessenden today's episode covers easily one of the most underrated ux topics out there accessibility quick history lesson about accessibility in the US the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990 and the worldwide web was made public in 1993 so it's unsurprising that many people assume that digital accessibility isn't a novel concept after all Ada law predates the internet so certainly most design and development standards already account for accessibility right but this assumption couldn't be further from the truth in fact truly accessible design is still incredibly rare and it's only in recent years that it's become part of the mainstream conversation so to explore this topic we chatted with ux researcher and product designer Steph Walter Stephanie is based in Luxembourg as a lead ux design consultant at malam and she has over a decade of experience working in the realm of Enterprise and financial ux she also teaches classes on mobile and responsive design and has a wealth of knowledge about accessibility that she regularly publishes so in this episode she shares a bit about what got her interested in accessibility to to begin with what accessibility truly means in the realm of ux some common misconceptions and finally how designers can start to create more inclusive experiences I'm excited for you to hear this episode because this was a really fun one for me so I hope you enjoy with that here's Steph Stephanie thank you for joining us today I'm really excited to talk to you about accessibility about neurodiversity and a lot of other great topics and I know one of the reasons I reach out to you is you've been putting out a ton of findings observations resources around accessibility and accessible designs was there a moment or something that maybe sparked your interest and catalyzed your desire to like share this information with other people yeah so I've met different people with different disabilities in my life like my mom used to work for a death person and uh she would bring me along and the lady was able to read on my lips so this is why kind of like the first time am I met someone with a visible disability at least and um we talked about disability a little bit um in my master degree when we were talking about usability and I had a student with a wheelchair in my class and I discovered how even like when you are doing things on the usability and at a university like people were so kind of ableist against my friend I remember like there was one teacher who was talking to my friend as if she was a five years old like very patronizing and at some point we snapped like my another friend of mine like you know she's in a master degree with all of us just because she's in a wheelchair doesn't mean she has like less cognitive abilities then we all do so please talk to her like you talk to any other students so I was like like come on that was very very annoying so I kind of had the unfortunate also a chance to see firsthand and uh like how people get treated when they have a disability uh so like the concept of disability and all of that was something I understood but I didn't really know when I was studying that was this thing called accessibility that was really focusing on how do we make things accessible for disable users you usually hear about like building accessibility but not that much about web accessibility or like product Services accessibility so I kind of started digging into it via blog post via some conferences and when I worked in France the agency I was working for was actually specialized in accessible code so they trained me uh in accessible code first and then from the code I was like yeah okay but it's nice that you do something in code but if your mockups are not accessible you already have a kind of single point of failure before that is the developer going to correct your contrast issues for instance it should not be the developers job so I was like you know what maybe designers need to know about accessibility too and there were not a lot of resources at that time for designers like I remember L Laura Calbag She Wrote a book about accessibility for everyone and she I think was one of the first person who I saw was talking about accessibility but also from a designer point of view I was like yeah we need more resources so I started kind of digging in and saying okay what can we do what can we bring to the world to make this kind of more knowledge available for designers as well because you can fix a lot of issues already in the design phase so that would be the idea absolutely and yeah it's funny how you phrased it as kind of you know you had the chance or rather the unfortunate chance you know to uh see some of these more ableist scenarios firsthand or some of these major hurdles that a lot of disabled people have to overcome in order to use not just use designs like in in the context of digital you know environments but really just to kind of live day-to-day life which I think is maybe at the root of all accessibility nowadays um so I guess to backtrack a little bit um for those who might be newer to the field how would you define like accessibility in ux because I know you mentioned there's accessibility in buildings ux accessibility might be a bit different so how would you kind of Define it or make sense of it so it's about making PE sure that people with different types of disability can perceive the web interact with it and also contribute to the web so it's not just about being able to consume the information but like being able to also be part of the conversation which is also very very important and um often we think about blind people when we talk about accessibility usually is the first thing that comes to mind but there's kind of a lot of different disabilities and there's also a spectrum which means that people have different degrees of a disability and in it's also not a fixed point in life you can have a disability that will kind of move some unfortunately degenerate so get worse but also at some point you have people who have temporary disabilities like you might have an arm in a in a bandage or something like that or you might have something like someone might have chronic fatigue which means that in the morning they would be perfectly fine and then all of a sudden in the afternoon they do not have any energy anymore and maybe they need to have a wheelchair in the afternoon where they were walking in the morning or maybe you have someone who with a cognitive disability who is perfectly okay at some point and during the day they do not have any energy anymore they get brain frog and then they cannot do a cognitive task anymore so it's kind of very important I think to help people understand it's a spectrum so you have different feeling on the Spectrum you have a auditory impairment which are people with different degrees again of hearring loss so here if you think about design and ux uh you think about okay we need to make sure that if we are designing Zoom for instance or like any video conferencing tool we need to design a place to have captions and if you're like working at Netflix for instance they had captions but until I think a couple of months ago you could not like um configurate them so it was very annoying because if you have like an anime with a very light background the caption was white and was next to impossible to read so you might think like yeah okay as a designer there's not a lot of thing I can do for people with um auditory impairment but actually there is it's like you need to be aware aware of those things and need to be aware of what you can do in your interface to make things better then you have cognitive disabilities and learning disabilities so this is usually things like dyslexia ADHD autism but also people with brain injury with mental disability uh someone with long covid who has um issues with their cognitive capabilities so here I think is the most understood one because it's very invisible unless someone talks to you about it it's very hard to know that someone has a cognitive disability un least they are very open about it and here I think as you X we have a lot of things to do because we work on information architecture we work on ux writing we can work on making tasks easier we can work on memory like we you know we talk a lot in ux of the Miller low who like this magic number this magic number is about memory so there's a lot of overlaps when it comes to cognitive disability because often people in ux field also are into the cognitive science field and um so there's actually a lot of things that can be done and then physical disabilities so this is what we think about too like weakness limit mus solar control like someone not able to use their Mouse who might use a keyboard or someone not able to use their hands at all who might use a head stick so they will have a little stick on there and they will type or like put the stick on the touch screen things like that so here designers can think about guidelines for keyboard navigation things like that making sure that labels are properly labeled if you think about someone who will control their screen with voice they will literally talk to their screen so the stuff in the screen needs to have names otherwise they canot say click the that button that has a name something like that we have speech which are people who have difficulty to talk so again often we think about muteness but it also um involve people with different um levels so like someone who stutters a lot or someone who has a maybe a facial paralysis that makes their pronunciation very hard we have more and more tools about with AI tool where you can talk to the AI tool but if we do not train the model of some on people who do not have the perfect American English with different accents around the world but also different disabilities it will be very very hard to use and then last one is visual this is the one we usually think about the most like people who are blind partially completely also colorblind people so people who cannot perceive the colors and here again there's a lot of things designer can do for screen reader support but also like um color support and stuff like that so there's kind of a wide range and I think most designers they hear about accessibility they think about okay colors and then they think okay but screen read is something technical there's nothing I can do about that but you're like look if you are going to design an interface where you replace a button with a label by an icon this icon needs to be read by the screen reader and it's not your developer's job to try to guess based on your icon what you want this to read is your designer job to say okay these icon should have be that label and this is what is it save is it share is it so here again there's a lot of things about communicating the intent and intention of the design and that's whole part of of the the uxix um ux design and ux research as well yeah so what I'm taking away from this is first off there's such a massive spectrum of different kinds of disabilities that we can be considering in our design process so that's that's the first Spectrum but even within each of these different types of disabilities there is a spectrum of ability or disability within that like like you were saying there's someone who might have an injured arm for example maybe they went skiing and broke their arm then okay their arm is temporarily disabled they still would like to do the things they normally do like order their food you know to get delivered to their house or to uh you know order some groceries for them so that certainly is another way to reframe accessibility not so much as oh we're designing for all these people with lifelong conditions although certainly that is a group of people we are designing for but that these sorts of benefits if we are to design for those folks those benefits extend far beyond just those long-term disabled folks and the other thing that comes to mind too is like you're saying with the the cognitive side of things it's very rare for people to think about at least from different clients that I've worked with very rare for folks to think about how can I make sure this is readable by dyslexic folks and and that conversation spans Beyond font choice for example I know there are dyslexic oriented fonts but there's more to that you know more to content writing than just picking a font and calling it good as well so it sounds like there's plenty of opportunity to explore and I know probably we're not going to get to all of that in this podcast because there's just so much to talk about but um but I think that's a really healthy way of looking at it as well yeah and it's usually about making it easier for everyone like one of the things with dyslexia is uh using simpler words simpler sentences and uh also like um letting the people actually choose the font because I was I I have friends with dyslexia who hates the like open dyslexia they're like no I cannot read that so it's a little bit tricky because the way you read is also highly influenced by the font you used to see on a daily basis so for them they're like well I prefer to be able to switch the font and I'm using a screen reader so they might not use the same screen reader as a blind person but my friend bought um I don't remember the name but basically they we do um DND together and they have a tool that lets uh that reads the DND PDF for them so they do not need to read it themselves as a dyslexic person they just listen to it which is also a help and this is usually something you don't think about like this Lexia okay I need to work on the phone or you can remove the need to read at all in this specific case yeah that's really amazing think about how creative people are at solving their particular challenges um and it's actually funny you mentioned that screen reading tool like for me as someone I struggle with attention myself and one of my ways of overcoming that uh difficulty is to have uh I also have like a PDF reader basically and there's different voices I can choose and so I can put on this you know I can take an academic paper for example just throw on some headphones walk outside and listen to the the findings in this paper and sometimes that's even better for my attention span than you know another mode or method so it's it's a lot it sounds like designing for accessibility is not just um you know tweaking the visuals but also considering that there's many other modes and U many other ways to engage with that particular content for sure now I have another question here about making accessible designs I know we kind of talked about some common pitfalls like oh people tend to error on the side of like picking colors and saying okay I have accessible colors my accessibility is good to go um what else do you think might stop teams from making accessible designs so I will start with the Positive idea which is like I think most people would like to if they knew how to and I think it's like a lack of knowledge you cannot know what you do not know so if you've never heard of about accessibility why would you want to do that because you do not even know it exists so like a couple of years ago I think there was a picture of a blind person in um the Metro uh using a screen reader and like I don't remember if it was giz mod or anyone under this kind of news was like ah let's not pretend that person can use a phone it's like yeah they can they totally can use a phone so even in like the general population you have people who think that a blind person can use the phone well if you ask anyone who knows a little bit about accessibility there will be like actually like a lot of blind people use a lot their phones because it's amazing to have a small computer in your pocket or something like that but this is kind of gener general like lack of knowledge and high level of ableist society that doesn't kind of showcase the fact that yeah disabled people can do a lot of things also so you would start with education education of developers who do not usually get taught about how to technically make a website accessible and also education to designers and like general education about these kind of degrees of disability so that we understand that it's not it's not always kind of one way or one point it's as I said kind of an umbrella it moves around it really depends on the people and understand kind of the diversity of disability which is a little bit weird I think it's also very very important so I say yeah like educating people would be a first step but then if you educate people most of the time you educate designers developers you you are at bottom to top the problem is then those people might be educated they might want to do things and then they hit a wall where you will have stakeholders manager who will say yeah but we don't have blind user we don't really need to make the website access and then you're like yeah welcome to survival bias 101 maybe you do not have blind users because your website is not accessible ever thought about that I had the case like I was working for some people who were like yeah but the website is generating 20% of the R so we're not investing that much in the website like have you tried to use your own website maybe if it was better it would generate more revenue and that's exactly the same thing like if your website is not accessible to blind people I was working on an e-commerce website where you could not access the basket via keyboard navigation so you could add stuff in the basket but then you can never access the basket with keyboard so you need a mouse to access the basket it's like yeah of course you do not have blind people or keyboard users who buy from you because they cannot buy from you because they cannot access your basket to buy from you so yeah that's indeed a big problem so when you have like this kind of yeah we need to make a business case for accessibility it's like Yay uh that's kind of a false argument is at some point you need to make it accessible because it's the right thing to do and also like yes disabled people have money so they would like to be consumers as well and there's like a lot of talk in like disability communities so if something is great usually they will talk about it and they will recommend it to other people because having something that is accessible uh is kind of still a little bit rare in some areas so if you have a product that is very very good you will get more consumers for sure and then I think the last thing I don't really like the argument but is like the regulation one is to say look if you're in the US the UK we already have a lot of laws on accessibility in Europe European accessibility Act is coming next year and so so for now in Europe uh P public website institution have um compliance regulations around accessibility spoiler alert a lot are not compliance but okay uh they don't get fins I think for now because it's public website in 2025 European uh accessibility Act is um coming to all the countries in Europe and then um if you have a commercial website and even a private website but you're selling FS to people uh you will need to um comply with a very specific set of rules about accessibility is basically based on the wag which is the kind of main entity when you talk plus a couple of other ones so they added extra things to go beyond wak but that's it and it's not just like website like any digital product if you have a smart TV if you have um e-reader for instance it should be accessible so I'm very curious to see where this is going to to to send the E readers and all of that so yeah that's kind of unfortunately L argument which is yeah you have to be because LW and compliance yeah right right and and actually that last one as as good as it is to have laws that protect people who have disabilities and you know hopefully help move most products and services toward being accessible the flip side of that is sometimes people use like Easy Button Solutions like what comes to mind is there there have been these accessibility plugins um and I'm trying to remember I know one of them was like accessib and they faced a really massive lawsuit because they kind of promised to a lot of uh organizations will make your website compliant just use this plugin and everything's going to be you know readable on a screen reader the problem is though it it just simply acted as a screen reader and also it kind of interfered with people's existing screen reader technology that they had it made it worse right and so what what is kind of the pro I don't want to say the problem with the regulations but the problem with the motivation behind only being compliant is that sometimes people don't actually end up doing the thing that helps them be compliant and then they kind of look for the shortcut to that compliance yeah they look for the quick feits exactly and on the bright side though I do think there is a lot more interest like saying there are people who are starting to learn more about accessibility and realize hey actually there's a lot more opportunity here to make this accessible not just to people with disabilities but people who might be temporarily excluded or having difficulty in some way and I I do think that cognitive reframing in a way of like hey we're just making this usable to more people makes accessibility less overwhelming and less scary I I think and sometimes you do not have to do a lot of things things that's also the thing if the website was designed properly it's mostly fixing code issues so that's the thing if you fix it if you develop it properly you do not need to fix it later so it's always the same it's like it cost a lot of money to fix a website that was poly developed and it's even worse if it was poly developed for accessibility but if you start from the beginning it doesn't have to cost much more money it's just about using the right tags and making sure it works properly and like in the design it's the same you do not get paid by how many colors you use in your color palettes you you just need to check that they work together for contrast or something like that so for me it becomes kind of um maybe if you work in a gel kind of definition of done definition of ready is like did we check the mockups for accessibility problems uh in the code is the same you cannot automate all the accessibility in code but you can run some automation to kind of give you a first idea so here again you could have some things where you run automation before pushing to like oh look your image doesn't have an alternative text you should do something about this and that and that so if you like include it from the beginning of the project when you start it doesn't have to cost that much more money and it's weird because you do not think about you do not think like that about security like let's do something and we'll fix security later well no so that's the thing like for security you wouldn't remove it from the invoice or remove it from the quot and we do it when someone complains well some do actually but usually it's not the case so it should be the same for accessibility it should be kind of part of the designer job developer job and then it would become kind of a natural thing to do into the process yeah and actually on that note too it it helps to have the set of guidelines to start with right to to kind of know what are the things to be thinking about and for me when I was newer I had zero idea about the guidelines um and so now just to kind of help some of the folks who are newer here listening to this episode if you want to know about some of these standards um there is actually an overseeing body for uh internet accessibility and I say internet accessibility kind of broadly because it's both websites as well as you know applications and anything that's basically connected to the internet but the worldwide Web Consortium or WC3 uh sorry w3c uh dictates what constitutes accessible design and they are regularly putting out these guidelines and so um as as you mentioned Stephanie the wcag or I guess it's sometimes referred to the that that stands for web content accessibility guidelines uh and they're regularly updating I think the latest version is 2.2 and there's um a draft currently in the works for 3 .0 which is supposed to make things easier to like make the guidelines themselves easier to understand but also uh we'll probably have some more um enhancements or improvements to the existing guidelines so anyway if you are looking into okay where do I start how do I learn about these uh those are absolutely a great place to begin now Stephanie I guess I have one more question for you which is could you offer any advice for teams who are currently struggling to get their management because like you said sometimes there is an interest but then some folks are saying well my manager doesn't think this is you know worth the time like what what advice can we give those folks so I would say show and show don't tell often Works nicely to build empathy so there's um I will send you the link you can put it in the notes like the w3c has very nice videos that show how people with disability use the web so this would be part of again educating people about disability and making them understand that yeah people with different disabilities use the web with different way different tools and we need to support that I would say also if you run usability testing you know sometimes you can tell something to a stakeholder 10 time they will not listen until you show them a user actually struggling with that so if you're running usability testing on your website and you're running it with disabled people I think it would be very interesting also to show to um your stakeholders and the people in charge who are not like sold on making the website accessible like yeah look this is how bad it is for some people so usually if you want to build an empathy with people who do not know anything about the topic you need to show them how the topic is going to impact them and I would also say like start somewhere like maybe start with colors because it's the easiest way but the fact that you start somewhere means you start it and then you will start with colors and we it will open a discussion and you will start opening the Pandora box and from color you might start talking about keyboard accessibility and all of that and then you might have a designer who knows nothing about keyboard accessibility who will ask to be trained and you'll have like discussions and things like that among the people in the team to try to understand a little bit better so it's like having a place to start and to start a discussion even if it's like very very small you will not fix all the accessibility problem of your website in two days but you need to start that that's the thing and from what I've seen usually when people start somewhere then this is just like the first little step and then you can build on top of this little step and improving it like little by little and then usually people get curious like but why can't we use this color then you can explain with the contrast and so it's Al kind of another way another way to build empathy which is explaining as a designer why you take those design decision because this is how it will impact people and it's the same with usability why did I put the button here and not here because this this this it will impact people like that and like that and here again you're kind of building empathy with the users and with users with different abilities and disabilities to help people uh actually become the advocates in your own in your own company and yeah then the legal Ruth is always an interesting one so you have a lot of company who have diversity Equity inclusion initiatives I would say if a company has that I would totally weaponize the they put on their website it's like if you tell me if I work for you and you have a very nice page on your website about uh diversity and on that's like oh you you're interested into inclusion and diversity and all of that okay let's put your money where your mouth is then so if they're like trying to serf on the trend of diversity Equity inclusion I would use that to push accessibility maybe it's a little bit sneaky but at some point if you pretend to do it let's do it for real you know at least I'm not saying all company pretend to be clear a lot actually care but it can be kind of another way to jump on the the bandwagon to say oh we have this initiative maybe EX accessibility could be part of that as well I think that's a really healthy way to look at it is to think about yes you can do it from the inside out right taking your existing research showing it to your manager building the empathy by showing what people actually go through it's hard to really argue when you witness something being truly you know horrendous for somebody um but the other side of it is to go top down in a way and if an organization is trying to exhibit certain values right to try to align some of these efforts with those projected values as you know hey our organization is focusing on some of these Dei efforts here's a really great way to do it and not only that this is something we can even brag about later right this can serve as like press for the organization to say hey here's an effort we're taking so yes it's Sneaky uh but at the same time it can serve like two purposes it can be a great way to kind of differentiate an organization and say hey we're doing something that truly helping people and and kind of to your point earlier you said that it's rare to have really welld designed accessible uh interfaces right and one of the classes I teach is um emerging patterns in interface design and we have a whole section in the course dedicated to accessibility and I remember there are a couple times some people would be like well accessibility is not new it's been around especially in the US the Americans with Disability Act the Ada law has has been around for a long time since the 90s so when we have this section sometimes folks are like accessibility is not new it's like well no it's not new but what is new is the fact people are finally being serious about it and people are finally putting their efforts into these and so yes it is emerging in the sense that these these interfaces are rare and awesome when they do exist so maybe there's can be you know more of that into the future so um so yeah I hate that it's in the emerging patterns class but I'm glad that it is something that seems to be gaining more momentum over time but the thing is we have new patterns that get created all the time like drag and drop didn't exist a couple of years ago and now we use that a lot and it has issues with accessibility and we need to make that accessible and if you think about interacting with AI for instance like that also brings a lot of new things but it also means these new things need to be accessible too so for me access there will always be emerging accessibility pattern because there will always be emerging patterns so it for me it totally makes sense to teach it as a emerging in an emerging pattern to um feed for sure absolutely and thank you thank you for validating that because I always feel the same way there's constantly new things yes thank you um well Stephanie it has been so fun talking about accessibility learning from the wealth of knowledge you have and being able to continue sharing that with others um to close I know that you are regularly putting out lots more information about how people can make accessible designs um are there certain places you could Point people to uh for where they can continue to find this stuff I'll do self self-promotion I need to put the link I have um accessibility an article where I basically put all the resources I find interesting for designer and it's called accessibility for designer where do I start so I will put you in the notes then the W fre as I said they have amazing people who write all of those things who take the videos who make sure that you have all this information about accessibility for free so yeah there's a there's a lot of places where you can basically go and learn about that without even having to pay and then once you're ready there's also like good paying courses the one I really like is Sarah Sweden has a one about practical accessibility it's more for developers but even as a designer she talks a lot about design patterns and all of that so you might be a little bit lost once you should just starts talking about JavaScript but there's still a lot of very interesting things in there so yeah there's a lot of resources awesome well thank you for sharing those and I believe your website is Stephanie walter. design so uh if you want to learn more about Stephany please do feel free to check that out but anyway just wanted to say thank you so much for taking the time to be here with us us uh it has been so fun thanks for having me that was Stephanie Walter you can find all the links that she's just mentioned in the show notes but also don't forget we have on our website lots of Articles and videos about accessible design inclusive research as well as many others about ux design research strategy and ux careers so to learn more about all of that go to our website www.group.com that's nn G r.com finally if you enjoy this show in particular please follow or subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice this show is hosted and produced by me theres fessenden all production and editing is by Chrissy Richardson that's it for today's show until next time remember keep it simple