Have you ever thought how would it be like to wake up in the morning having 80% vision loss, or lose your arms mobility? How your daily activities would be affected? Yes, I’m pretty sure we don’t think about that unless you have one of those conditions.

Whether you are an engineer or a designer (actually, any profession you may have) it’s our responsibility to think about these scenarios at the time of creating and implementing products, software, services, etc. Real innovation takes accessibility (a11y) into consideration.

A few days back I attended a “diversity and inclusion” training where some observations came up (besides the obvious ones: race, sexual orientation, religion, etc) like why companies communications don’t include overweight people in their visuals, or why the age of employees is between 20 to 35 years old… and of course, I thought about people with disabilities.

In my everyday work, I have to think about how would be to navigate a website with my eyes closed or navigate a website just with keyboard (no mouse). Is it accessible? Responding to pretty basic needs like contrast colors, accessible font-size, navigate using only the keyboard, all elements should give the right context using assistive technology, custom dropdowns behave like a native select, etc. and of course, is the user able to complete the desired action? Cases like making the monthly electricity payment or a transaction from a bank account to another, book a doctors appointment and so forth.

And it’s hard to think that way, or test new implementations “imagining” a disability. Think about a11y mobile devices, different OS and assistive technologies, and so on. Imagine spreading this way of thinking to product, management, engineering, and quality assurance people.

And then, in a discussion with my peers, an idea popped, which is chasing my mind lately: What if a part of diversity and inclusion at companies would be to hire people with disabilities as Q.A.? Wouldn’t that be real innovation? Wouldn’t that lead companies to deliver products, software or services really accessible? I’m pretty sure there might be companies that already do it, but, are we encouraging this kind of inclusion and diversity actions? I know we can do more of what we are doing now.

Basic stuff on web a11y among a big list of things to consider:
• Color contrast
• Correct font-size
• Friendly keyboard navigation
• Understandable assistive technology context
• Correct usage of HTML elements
• Correct HTML structure and semantic

Questions? Comments? Please let me know as I’m planning to publish more about a11y and the questions or scenarios I have to face day to day.