Accessibility Practices for Prototype Creation and Testing

• Published in: Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Design Methods and User Experience pp. 89 - 98
• Main Authors: Gupta, Nandita, Bruce, Carrie
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Accessibility; Feedback; Human-centered design; Processes; Prototype; Usability
• ISBN: 3030780910; 9783030780913
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-78092-0_6

The paper will share practices and processes followed for the design and prototyping stage of the digital accessibility storytelling collective project that showcased the stories and work done by various technology professionals around the globe working in digital accessibility. By being more inclusive in our processes, we can bring more people into the conversation. Thus, we aimed to bake accessibility into our processes to ensure an inclusive and accessible product. Our specific aims during this phase were: 1) Seek feedback from different users and stakeholders. 2) Ensure documentation and prioritization of accessibility issues. 3) Create an inclusive product through iterative inclusive design. Thus, the goal of this paper is to describe and share the process of building this storytelling product, followed by a discussion of the learnings from integrating accessibility into design. Our processes led us to various insights that not only helped us improve our product, but also taught us valuable lessons for future processes. It gave us an opportunity to iterate on our product to ensure accessibility errors were documented and prioritized. Feedback sessions with users and stakeholders improved our awareness on our processes. Our later project stages, including evaluation, showed us how these design processes led to an accessible product and allowed us to capture critical issues and errors during this stage.