An accessible UX checklist for charities

Where to start

 

If you had staff or volunteers working on a digital system, you’d listen to them and identify reasonable adjustments to accommodate their needs. When designing a public-facing service, the principle of user-centric design applies. Best practice as set out in the Charity Digital Code states you should take the time to listen and empathise with your audience’s needs, whether through focused user testing with a select group of beneficiaries or making use of the data that you have on your audience.

 

However, there are some basic guidelines that are recognised as the best starting point. These recommendations are called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and The UK Government uses these standards as a requirement for all web content and digital services it creates.

 

The basic principles should be applied whether your charity is building something from scratch (like a website or a mobile app) or considering an existing platform on which to build your service (for instance, a Facebook group, a pre-built chatbot interface or a Zoom session for service users). While you might have different levels of control over the UX of these tools, they all have one and need to be accessible. These guidelines allow you to identify earlier on in the process if your services are not accessible and fix them, or find a different platform.

 

Current WCAG standards are based on 4 design principles:

 

 

Perceivable

This means making sure users can recognise and use your service with the senses that are available to them.

 

This means, for example, providing alt text on images, captions and transcripts on audio and video, proper contrast between the text and background, and making sure the service works with assistive technologies. The full list is here.

Operable

Speaking of assistive technologies... to have digital services that are ’operable’, you have to make sure users can find and use your content, regardless of how they choose to access it.

 

For example, consider the different ways people might interact with your content, like:

 

• Using a text-to-speech screen reader
• Using a screen magnifier or change browser settings to make reading easier
• Using voice commands to navigate a website
• Using a keyboard instead of a mouse for mobility reasons

 

The WCAG has full guidelines on how to consider these in your design here.

Understandable

 

To meet the ’understandable’ principle, you have to make sure everyone can understand your content and how the service works.

 

We’ve recently covered ’readability’ and tips on making your content clearer and easier to read, but for the full guidelines go here.

 

Robust

 

For a service or product to be robust, you must make sure your content can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents. This one is slightly more technical mainly comes down to compatibility, and making sure that the code within your product can happily speak to the code within any assistive technologies and browsers.

 

What’s in this article isn’t a comprehensive WCAG policy checklist, but these principles cover the basic ’lenses’ through which you should look at the accessibility of your digital services.