Who to include when testing for accessibility
When developing a product or service you should aim to include people with a range of disabilities including:
- visual
- auditory
- physical
- cognitive
You should include people who use a variety of assistive technologies such as screen readers, screen magnification and speech recognition software. You should also consider people who customise their settings, including resizing text, changing colours and zooming into the content.
If you’re testing a specific feature targeted at a particular group of people, you should test it with them. For example, include people who are Deaf and hard of hearing when testing captions in video. You should also consider including other people who use captions, such as non-native speakers and older people who may have poor hearing and vision.
You should aim to recruit people from a variety of backgrounds such as different age groups, genders, and ethnicities. This makes your testing as inclusive as possible.
How to conduct testing with disabled people
How you conduct your testing will depend on your project, budget and resources.
A common approach is working with a usability testing company that specialises in testing with disabled people. They’ll be able to help you identify what to test, who to test it with, and how to recruit disabled people. They’ll also set up and run inclusive usability testing sessions and provide reports and an analysis of the findings.
If you have a user research team in-house they can help you. If they haven’t run usability testing with disabled people before, they can work with an agency to recruit people and moderate the sessions.
There is a problem
Thanks for your feedback