Accessibility is a vast topic that has a lot of misconceptions. When people hear the word “accessibility”, the first things that come to mind are colour blindness, assistive technology (screen readers), people with disabilities and minority.

Questions that usually come up

How many of our users are actually differently enabled?

Do we need to spend that much time, effort and energy on something that could be viewed as an edge case?

Are we focussing too much attention on a small group of people?

The thing is, not every disability is a visible disability and obvious. You can’t always tell that someone has a disability just by looking at them and not everyone will disclose that they have a non-visible disability. Disabilities can also be environmental or temporary.

Environmental disabilities

The lighting is poor or your computer monitor isn’t that great so you have trouble reading the screen.

You’re somewhere noisy so you can’t hear the video/audio very well phone support.

Temporary disabilities

Someone goes skiing and breaks their arm.

Your carpal tunnel is flaring up so you don’t want to use the mouse more than you have to.

You have arthritis in your hands (very common as people age).

Other temporary impairments could occur because of surgery or medication.

People who suffer from temporary impairments may not know about accessibility solutions. They may not know how to use accessibility features and will struggle to do their jobs if we don’t make our software accessible.

Galvanize’s accessibility goals

Here at Galvanize, we believe that building accessible software is the right thing to do for all of our users regardless of ability. Software that is designed and built to pass WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards results in a better experience for everyone. Out of a total of 38 requirements from WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA, there is only a very small numbers of the requirements pertaining to users with disabilities. The rest are related to usability.

Be inclusive

We want to design software that is accessible to as many people as possible.

Improve user efficiency

Accessible software allows users to navigate more effectively using a keyboard. (e.g. keyboard shortcuts or terminate an interaction flow using the esc key).