Why consider accessibility during empathy?

Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities.

Accessibility design is about considering the pathways of all users and keeping in mind their permanent, temporary, or situational disabilities. By researching how people with disabilities interact with products like yours, you can better understand how to design for them. It's not possible to accurately guess all the ways a user might experience your product. That's one reason why including people with disabilities in your research is so important.

Accessibility considerations

Below are some considerations to keep in mind when conducting research in the empathy phase of the design process.

From permanent (one-armed) to temporary (arm injury) to situational (e.g new parent)

Touch

How would you design for users who can only use one arm, either permanently, temporarily, or situationally?

Decide where to place the buttons in your design based on different hand sizes.

Create a feature that allows double tapping to avoid accidentally clicking on icons.

Enable the one-handed keyboard feature and general keyboard compatibility.

Allow customization of buttons to make it easier to access information that is most important to the user.

From permanent blindness to temporary (glasses wearer) to situational (e.g distracted driver)

See

How would you design for users who have permanently, temporarily, or situationally impaired vision?

Use a larger font to create a reader-friendly design for the app.

Make sure the app and images have alternative text that can be read by a screen reader.

Identify if the user is driving a motor vehicle.

Design the app with high contrast colors.

Do not rely on text color to explain navigation or next steps. For example, do not just use red text to indicate a warning. Instead, your design should include explicit instructions.

From permanent (hearing loss) to temporary (ear infection) to situational (e.g bartender)

Hear

How would you design a website for users who have permanently, temporarily, or situationally limited hearing?

Do not rely solely on sounds to convey app updates like notification of a new message. Instead, enable haptics, i.e. vibrations that appeal to the user's sense of touch, and notification lights.

All videos should be captioned. Offer a text messaging system within the app so users can communicate in writing.

From permanent (non-verbal) to temporary (laryngitis) to situational (e.g non-native speaker)

Speak

How would you design the app for users who cannot speak, whether permanently, temporarily, or situationally?

Provide written introductions, descriptions, and instructions for users in addition to video-based content.

Offer Real-Time Texting for phone conversations with users or with app support.

Create alternatives for automated systems that rely on speech recognition.

Offer an in-app messaging system that allows the use of emojis and uploading of images.

This list is just a small portion of the considerations you should take into account when designing for users with disabilities. The best way to find out how to improve your designs is to do research and get direct feedback from people with disabilities.