The issue in Web accessibility is the fact that blind and visually-impaired people need the single biggest boost to achieve equivalence since the real-world web is a visual medium.
Initial Thought - Accessibility
The first question which came to our mind is what actually accessibility is?
So, accessibility is the act of making your websites usable by however many individuals as could be allowed. We generally consider this to be about people with disabilities, however, the practice of making sites accessible also benefits other groups such as those using mobile devices, or those with slow network connections.
Additionally, some years ago the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed a law in 1990. The ADA is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including jobs, schools, transportation, and all public and private places that are open to the general public.
The purpose of the law is to make sure that people with disabilities have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else. So keeping this in mind the user experience designers also should plan and ensure equal accessibility for all kinds of users by designing web-based experiences that can be used, understood, and accessed by people with a diverse range of visual, auditory, cognitive, and physical abilities.
Accessibility & Visual Impairment
When there is debate regarding accessibility there comes visual impairment, before beginning anything we also should know what is visual impairment? It is a term experts use to depict any sort of vision loss, whether it's someone who can't see at all or someone who has partial vision loss. Also, there are individuals who are completely blind, but many others have what's called legal blindness.
Research & Surveys
According to some research and surveys which says that there are 50 million people in the United States aged 40 or older who have some form of visual impairment issues, which can be from mild to severe, and about 18 - 20 percent of those affected are “legally blind.” It holds a range of issues and disabilities, the most common of which are colour blindness, low vision, and complete blindness. Individuals who have colour blindness issues find it very difficult to distinguish between red, green, and blue mainly.
This breaks colour blindness into categories named, Protanopia (red/green; reduced sensitivity to red), Deuteranopia (red/green; reduced sensitivity to green), Tritanopia (blue/yellow; reduced sensitivity to blue), and Achromatopsia/Greyscale (this includes for all form of colour blindness).
Additionally, these types may be examined using the online colour-blind web page filter "Toptal" tool. Colour blindness affects 0.5 to 1 percent of women and 8 to 9 percent of men worldwide, respectively. Before building any platform, web designers should keep these statistics in mind.
WAVE - Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
Recently, a client from the United States asked us to make their website accessible and to think of ideas to make it comfortable for every sort of user, whether the person has excellent eyesight 6 by 6, any type of colour blindness, or is entirely blind. Since the client is among the best in its industry, we took the time to do our research, look at their rivals, as well as some general enterprises in the United States, to find out what they are doing to make their website accessible to all types of users.
In this phase, we came across a tool called WAVE - Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. With the help of this tool authors make their web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities. It can identify many accessibility and Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) errors but also facilitates human evaluation of web content. Through this process, we analysed the Client’s and Competitor’s platforms and found out that our client is performing well. There were some issues regarding the contrast but as compared to the competitors we were performing well. As for the 18 contrast issues which are mentioned below screenshot those were the repetitive issues regarding the brand colour which is dull green.
Usability Testing
After analysing all the research, we conducted usability testing for the visually impaired person in collaboration with the blind organisation. They provided us with 10 users who have different kinds of blindness which include colour blindness and completely blind individuals. We asked them to go through our client’s site and experience it. In this manner, we observe the complete behaviour of the user and also recorded their screens through the online tool “Hotjar”. It is an amazing tool that is used to understand how users behave on your site, what they need, and how they feel. Last but not least, in order to better understand the challenges people had using the website and learn more about their experiences, we also conducted interviews with people.
Conclusion
In this way, we arrived at the decision for our client that we updated their brand colour and also put a button "Accessibility View" on the top left to turn on a different design interface with greater contrast and huge text sizes for visually impaired persons. For people who are blind, this activity can make life simpler. They frequently use a screen reader such as Talkback or Jaws, and by selecting the "Accessibility View" button, the screen reader will begin reading from the top left, making things go more smoothly.
