Testing for total accessibility: Why every participant is essential

Don’t you get annoyed when you’re scrolling up and down a website and you can’t find contact details? What about when the light grey text against a white background is so minimalist it hurts your eyes?

Everyone has internet pet peeves, but some apparently harmless design features and functionalities (or lack thereof) can turn into major obstacles for disabled people.

The World Report on Disability, published in 2011 by the World Health Organisation (WHO), mentions that 15 per cent of the world population is disabled. This means over one billion people in the world have some form of disability, and between 110-190 million people have serious accessibility issues.

Seeing the world from a different perspective

According to global internet usage numbers, over 400 million people with disability surf the internet on a daily basis. While some of them suffer from disabilities that don’t affect their online experience, others need accessibility software or special devices to visit a website or shop online.

When developers and designers create websites, apps and software, they may sometimes forget they are also developing a product for disabled people because that is not how they see the world. This is why testing for accessibility is an essential part of the process.

When web design professionals or hardware manufacturers test their products exclusively with people that don’t have disabilities, they tend to ignore obvious issues that are likely to affect disabled users.

“They don’t know what we face when we use their products or devices. They don’t know how we feel and the sort of difficulties we encounter”, says Norin Khanna, a disabled member of the PfR community.

According to Norin, who is visually impaired, only “30 to 40 percent of websites are truly accessible”. While people with different types of disability may be affected in different ways, it is safe to say that not all the corners of the world wide web are completely accessible.

“It’s really important to test everything”, Norin says, and test it for and with everyone!

If you have accessibility issues, join the PfR community and help us make the world a more accessible place.