Developing accessible services: understanding current knowledge and areas for future support.

Crabb, Michael; Heron, Michael; Jones, Rhianne; Armstrong, Mike; Reid, Hayley; Wilson, Amy

Abstract

When creating digital artefacts, it is important to ensure that the product being made is accessible to as much of the population as is possible. Many guidelines and supporting tools exist to assist reaching this goal. However, little is known about developers’ understanding of accessible practice and the methods that are used to implement this.We present findings from an accessibility design workshop that was carried out with a mixture of 197 developers and digital technology students. We discuss perceptions of accessibility, techniques that are used when designing accessible products, and what areas of accessibility development participants believed were important. We show that there are gaps in the knowledge needed to develop accessible products despite the effort to promote accessible design. Our participants are themselves aware of where these gaps are and have suggested a number of areas where tools, techniques and guidance would improve their practice.

Citation

CRABB, M., HERON, M., JONES, R., ARMSTRONG, M., REID, H. and WILSON, A. 2019. Developing accessible services: understanding current knowledge and areas for future support. In Proceedings of the conference on human factors in computing systems 2019 (CHI 2019): weaving the threads of CHI, 4-9 May 2019, Glasgow, UK. New York: ACM [online], paper 216. Available from: https://doi.6org/10.1145/3290605.3300446

• Conference Name: 2019 conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI 2019): weaving the threads of CHI
• Conference Location: Glasgow, UK
• Start Date: May 4, 2019
• End Date: May 9, 2019
• Acceptance Date: Dec 10, 2018
• Online Publication Date: May 2, 2019
• Publication Date: May 2, 2019
• Deposit Date: Feb 11, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 11, 2019
• Publisher: ACM Association for Computing Machinery
• Book Title: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems
• Chapter Number: Paper 216
• ISBN: 9781450359702
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300446
• Keywords: Accessibility; Digital accessibility; Web accessibility
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/3288