More than 1 billion people worldwide have disabilities and are underserved by today’s digital products. Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), recognised yearly on May 16, reminds us of this fact and aims to get everyone talking, thinking, and learning about digital access and inclusion.
By practicing inclusive design, businesses can increase revenue, decrease costs, improve resilience, and build trust with customers and employees. To practice inclusive design successfully, your research practices must also be inclusive.
This is especially important for disability inclusion, because many companies are tempted to use quick-fix solutions to comply with digital accessibility requirements and skip research done with people with disabilities. According to a recent Forrester survey, only 29% of businesses in North America gather feedback from people with disabilities on their products.
Including people with disabilities
Conducting research with a diverse range of participants is essential for inclusive research practices, and this requires inclusive recruitment.
You can reach diverse participants, including people with disabilities, by using inclusive screener questions. If you’re asking whether a participant has a disability, explain why you’re asking this question (e.g., “to better understand our customers”), and don’t forget to ask if they use any assistive technologies so that you can design your research study accordingly.
For example, make sure the tools you use to run research, such as experience research platforms, are accessible. Some of our clients partner with organisations such as Fable and Knowbility for access to panels of people with disabilities for research.
Successful companies that are dedicated to inclusive design also monitor participant demographics to ensure that they are reaching a diverse group of participants. You can start doing this by auditing past studies to see who participated and who is missing in your research.
Empathy practices
To build empathy with your customers, engage them throughout the design process — don’t just imagine what they might be going through. Empathy tools, such as personas and empathy maps, are great to understand customers, but without adequate research, these tools build on assumptions.
This is why empathy workshops — where employees pretend to have a disability (e.g., wearing a blindfold) and use the company’s products as a way of understanding the experiences of customers with disabilities — don’t work. Participants walk away from those workshops with negative feelings, thinking it was hard, and don’t realise that it was just their own lack of experience in using assistive technologies.
To understand experiences of customers with disabilities from their perspective, engage with them, observe their interactions with your product, and focus on solutions to improve their experiences.
Employee feedback
Employees know your company’s values, products, and customers, and their feedback is important to improve customer experience. Incorporating employee feedback to create accessible experiences not only improves your product but also shows that you recognise the value of employees’ thoughts.
It also raises awareness by signaling that inclusion is a core value for your company. Seeking employee feedback, especially from those with disabilities, helps you identify accessibility issues early in the product development process. Employee resource groups are a great place to start.
Originally posted in Forrester
