#01. Blind Users: reflections and learnings from usability testing sessions.
Reflecting on my first usability sessions with blind participants.
VoiceOver is a fantastic tool.
In fact, Apple is putting a lot of effort in building an ecosystem that is accessible and easy to use for everyone: from enabling captions in meetings to using the phone’s camera to navigate the world. For those relying on screen readers (and it is not only the blind), VoiceOver is literally a life-saver. VoiceOver users can top up their bank accounts, browse Twitter, book a taxi ride with ease.
Well, not quite with ease.
My name it Kristian, I am a Senior Product Designer and an Accessibility Committee Member at Grab. Today, I will walk you through some of the things I have learnt from talking to and observing the blind participants during usability testing sessions.
If you want to learn more about accessibility or follow me on my journey, subscribe to this free newsletter:
Please note: in this newsletter, I share my personal thoughts on the importance of accessible design, outline the things to consider when preparing for and running the sessions, and reflect on my learnings. I am not focusing on nor sharing any insights about Grab or any other app or business.
Learning #1: people know very little about accessibility.
When you say “accessibility”, many designers think “colour contrast” at best. Not many realise that dark mode can be considered an accessibility feature. Very few will think about people with invisible disabilities and how design can influence their experience:
If the content is complicated or uses jargon it will be inaccessible to someone with a learning disability.
As a person with ADHD, I can definitely relate: reading long paragraphs of text can hurt a lot. No, bionic reading doesn’t really help (at least in my case).
Designers and developers don’t take accessibility seriously. Project managers shake their heads, leadership want to see measurable impact (numbers), and getting them to support you as you’re striving to deliver an accessible experience to everyone might be challenging.
Globally, at least 2.2 billion people have a near or distance vision impairment
What can you do?
Being by educating your team on the importance of accessibility.
Show them a video of a blind person using Twitter or a video of Jared using a sip-and-puff device;
Send them a link to the Accessibility Myths website and Microsoft’s Inclusive Design;
Work with your PM/PO and data analysts to calculate the impact, if you need to get a buy-in from your leadership. Having millions of underserved users (globally or locally) is something no business should overlook;
Remind your team and your company that there are laws that demand them to adhere to certain standards, like the European Accessibility Act. Even if such law does not apply to your country today, it might appear in the future, and you will regret not having paid enough attention;
Start educating the team on accessibility standards: like W3C’s Introduction to Web Accessibility.
Set tangible and achievable goals from the very beginning: you want to clearly understand why you’re running the session and what the outcomes of it are. Whether it is an accessible MVP or gaining a better understanding of a particular audience group, having a clear goal and aligning on it with your team will help you better prepare for the session.
Learning #2: prepare for a session.
Preparing for a good session with a blind user takes roughly the same amount of time and effort as any other interview, except for a couple of distinct details to keep in mind.
Recruiting participants with visual impairment might take some time, especially if you have specific criteria (i.e. age, tech affinity, etc.);
Facilitating a remote session might not be the best idea. You may wish to be as close to your participant as possible to extract better insights: that means, observing them in their environment or inviting them to your office;
Writing a guide is hard. You need to know exactly what you are working with, so if you are not familiar with VoiceOver, leave it to someone who is. Also, you won’t be able to dry-run your sessions, so your first interview will most likely go widely off-script. Be ready to learn from it;
Setting up the gear (especially at the participant’s home) will take time, especially if you have a large team, and some people dial in remotely. From turning on Zoom, setting up the cameras, and connecting the phone to a laptop (so that you can see the actions your user takes).
What can you do?
Recruit an experienced researcher to write a guide and facilitate the session. Review the guide, and keep reviewing it after every session. Remember: things will never go according to your plan, but your objectives should remain unchanged regardless;
Find out about your user’s device as early as you can, and bring a separate back-up device, if possible. Make sure you don’t bring a back-up Google Pixel to an iPhone user;
Bring a camera, a powerbank, and every possible cable. A lavalier microphone would be a good companion, especially if the participant’s phone is old, and the VoiceOver is soft.
Spend some time to learn about your participant and connect with them when you arrive: be charming, sensitive, mindful of their feelings, but do not patronise them. Show your respect and treat your participants as the adults they are.
Learning #3: prepare to be surprised.
If you haven’t worked with the blind participants before, get ready to be surprised. You may have gained some knowledge from the YouTube videos and the accessibility standards, but much like J from “Men in Black”, accept that you know nothing until you’ve completed your first, second, millionth session.
For instance:
VoiceOver speaks really fast, but it also has a rotor: users quickly switch modes when they need it to, say, read one word at a time;
Nokia used to have a screen reader app before iPhone existed. VoiceOver and TalkBack are not the only two features people with visual impairments use;
Some apps are unexpectedly robust and well-optimised for VoiceOver, but not every well-designed app is easy to use. For instance, if the layout keeps changing, people who rely on VoiceOver will struggle to find a feature they came for;
VoiceOver is apparently far superior to TalkBack: the latter is told to be much slower, less optimised, and in general, not as smooth as iPhone’s VoiceOver.
Also, guide dogs are fantastic creatures, but if you are allergic or avoid dogs for other reasons, make sure to check if your participant has one beforehand.
Learning #4: reflect.
I don’t mean “debrief” or “have a retro”. I mean “reflect”.
Reflection is an art of analysing your past experiences and how they influenced your current practice, the craft or challenging your assumptions and beliefs, and making meaningful, actionable conclusions.
During and after each session, think about your thoughts and actions. Did you manage to build a good connection with your participant? Were your questions leading or not specific enough? Did you ask something that didn’t make sense to a blind person?
Think about how your learnings will manifest in your product or practice. Is there anything you will need to learn to better cater to your user’s needs? Are there any terms that you didn’t know, organisations that you could get in touch with, tools that you were unaware of?
Use the learnings to become a better designer.
Conclusion.
Accessibility is not an afterthought or a “nice-to-have”. It isn’t an investment the company chooses to make merely because the law prescribes it to. Watching videos or getting second-hand information will not introduce you to your real user, their needs, goals, and pain points.
No 2 blind users are the same. Some use a standard keyboard, others prefer Dictation and Braille Keyboards. Some users prefer iOS, others are fine with Android. Some are loyal and stick to the product that offers the best experience, others will go after the lowest price.
To me, working with the blind participants demonstrated me that:
I have much to learn. I am only making my first baby steps in the world of universal design, and I realise I knew nothing before I stepped into the first session with a blind participant, and that I still know very little. It is truly exciting and incredibly fascinating;
I have to drastically change the ways I think and work. Accessibility considerations must be deeply embedded into my design process: from discovery (ensure I work with users with impairments, and not only limited to vision impairments) to delivery, from visual design to content;
I cannot drive the change if I don’t know my user, and people who use assistive technology are my users as much as those who don’t. I need to work closely with them, reach out, and learn how I can help them: everyone, with no exception;
I didn’t know much about the blind people or their community before, couldn’t think of the pains they are facing daily, couldn’t understand how trivial tasks could cause so much trouble.
My knowledge mostly came from books like:
But no book can substitute a real human connection, no book will make you laugh or shed a tear the same way a human being can. Invite your colleagues—engineers, project managers, leaders—to join a session, and watch as their eyes open to the world they used to neglect. Watch how a dot in the report becomes a human with its aspirations and challenges, and how your brain gets busy trying to solve them, and how more and more people join you in an endeavour to help your user.
Every. User.
Enjoyed this issue? Share it with your friend!