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Accessible design follows accessibility guidelines and standards to create products that can be used by people with a variety of physical and cognitive disabilities. We spoke to Fran, Graham and Mel from the engineering team about why accessible design is especially important for companies that deal with customers in debt.
Abi: Welcome back to Break The Cycle! Today I’ve got Graham, Fran and Mel from the engineering team with me and we’re gonna be talking about all things accessible design, why it’s especially important for people in debt and how we go about designing with inclusivity in mind. So a definition is a good place to start, how do you guys go about defining accessibility?
Graham: When a lot of people hear 'accessibility' they immediately assume it's for the 1% of users who are blind or have a motor disability. But it's not just about that. The idea is that anyone who wants to use your product should be able to, it's not just about people with these obvious disabilities, there are also people who may not have access to devices that you support. So maybe if you only design your software to work on a mobile, someone who doesn't own a smartphone won't be able to use it if they're using a library computer or something. So the whole point of accessible design is that anyone who wants to use your product can use it.
Fran: Actually, I think Mel has a challenge for everybody.
Mel: There are some things that you can do to test on your own devices how accessible some of your favourite websites are. So on every device that you have nowadays, you should have a screen reader. And it's really interesting if you go to some of your favourite websites and turn it on and let it read out what comes up on the screen. And if you close your eyes, you can try and figure out how easy it is for people with, for example, blindness or an inability to navigate your site or whether some things are repeated a lot of times. It's very difficult when you go to a new page and every time you have to sit through the whole menu and things like this, it's impossible to skip. So yeah, it's really interesting, it can become really frustrating very easily.
Graham: A good example of a product I previously worked on, there's the usual header bar where you've got your logo and some navigation options on your website, and it turned out if you pressed tab, which is a very common way to cycle through links and buttons if you can't use a mouse, for example, it turned out that the tab just got stuck in the header. You couldn't progress past the header. So literally anyone who was trying to use that website with just a keyboard couldn't, they couldn't get out of the general navigation. And that was like that for several years and no one noticed. So it's really important to keep accessibility in mind when creating products. If you follow the standards correctly, then it is very easy to get 98% or even more, like 99% of the accessibility features working. And it also it tends to make your app work better. Following standards, using correct labels in your HTML can often mean you are less reliant on custom JavaScripts features that often break on different browsers and stuff like that. Following the standards makes your website more accessible and less bug prone.
Abi: What about when it comes to Ophelos? What do we do to make our website accessible? And why is it important for people in debt?
Mel: Especially for people in debt, I think we see a lot that we are trying to help vulnerable customers and people with vulnerability may very well have some form of disability and that may be why they are, for instance, vulnerable. So it is very important to us at Ophelos to try and help those people who are less able to get help elsewhere as it's really core to our values to help anyone who we can out of debt.
Graham: I think a good way to think about people in debt is we don't want to add to their problems, right? We want to help people as much as we can. And having a product that someone just can't use is not helpful, right? It's doesn't meet the objectives of our business. So it's important that we make our website accessible so that anyone can get the help that they need. So when someone first signs in to the app, we give them a reference code to use to log into their account. And the input we have for that looks like six individual inputs for each character of the reference code so that it is obvious how many characters there are.
But in the initial implementation, this was done with six separate input fields, which, for someone who's relying on the screen reader to tell them what's on screen is a very confusing interface. You have to make sure you label the fields correctly, and then you have some custom JavaScript so that it jumps between the things as someone who can see what's going on would expect, but if you can't see what's happening on the screen, then it just sounds like your cursor is jumping all over the place to all these different input boxes and it's very confusing. So we ended up replacing it with just one input field. We managed to dial it, so it looks like separate boxes for each character, but in the actual HTML it is just one input field, which is a lot easier to understand for someone who can't actually see what's going on on the screen.
Abi: That's really interesting. Well, thanks for joining me, everyone.
Graham: Thank you for having us.
Fran: Thanks Abi.
This is a mini series brought to you by Ophelos, the Ethical Debt Platform. If you want to know more, follow us on LinkedIn or read our latest blog post at content.ophelos.com. Thanks for listening.
