Building accessible digital tools
How accessibility testing helped us improve our advice tool for all our advisers
We’re building a new way for advisers to navigate our content at Citizens Advice. We’ve talked before about how we’ve been developing this product to make sure it meets our advisers’ needs.
In May, we tested this product with advisers with a range of accessibility needs. It’s important we make our services accessible, and our new tool for advisers is no different. Making our advice tools more accessible means we can provide the best support to our diverse network of advisers, which in turn results in more clients helped.
But something about this round of testing surprised us: by improving the tool for advisers with specific accessibility needs, we improved the tool for everyone.
We tested with advisers with a range of needs
We visited 4 advisers across the country who had reduced vision, colour blindness, chronic pain, limited mobility and other conditions that affected their ability to use digital tools.
Our testers used a wide range of assistive technologies to help them access digital tools. These included screen-readers, voice-recognition software and zoom functions on their computer.
They also had lots of other workarounds that helped them do their jobs. One tester used a pencil to help her use the keyboard and a support worker when she wasn’t able to type at all.
The tool worked well for advisers using a range of assistive technologies
When people used our navigation bar, it generally worked well and it didn’t take long for testers to find most things.
“What is Universal Credit.. Ah, I found it!”
All our testers were able to complete their tasks and became more used to how the tool worked over the course of the tasks.
“Ah ha, so it keeps scrolling on the right, then scrolls there…”
One person thought it would get easier to use as you became accustomed to it.
“Over time, once you know it scrolls — you’ll do it.”
But what we didn’t expect to find was that the usability issues we identified through the accessibility testing wouldn’t be accessibility-specific at all.
The access needs we found weren’t really access needs at all
The headings we use in publicly available content can be long, because we know our clients find more explanatory headings easier to understand. In this new tool, we had squeezed these headings into a narrow navigation bar.
When we tested it, people found the text too small to read. We’d reduced the font size to fit it into our navigation bar and it wasn’t working.
While this was especially an issue for those with visual impairments, and zoom users, the issue was shared by everyone. Even us researchers found ourselves squinting to see it from behind our testers.
By testing with users with particular needs, we’d found issues that we could improve for everyone.
Adapting our writing style allowed us to make the tool more accessible
It was obvious we needed to increase the font size, and that was an easy fix for Paul, our UX Designer.
But it also became clear that the length of headings also needed to be reduced. They ran over multiple lines and that made them difficult to skim — something we know our advisers do a lot, especially when they have a client in the room with them. This issue can be even worse for people who use the zoom function on their computer.
So, we changed the headings so they’re in the same style as we use for advisers. This reduced the title length and made navigation far easier.
What we’ll do next
Our next steps are to make the changes we identified in the research, some of which we’ve already done.
Our content on Universal Credit will be published in this new style alongside our existing content. We’ll be monitoring the pages’ performance and paying close attention to feedback as this roll out happens.
We’re also thinking about longer term ways to make our advice more accessible. We had lots of suggestions from our accessibility testers.
“It’d be nice to have audio interaction like WhatsApp…”
Keep an eye out for more blogs on accessibility testing. We’ll be talking about what we learned about accessibility through this process, and also sharing some reflections on how we’ll approach accessibility testing in the future.
If you’re an adviser from one of our local services and you’d like to get involved in the next round of testing, please email userresearch@citizensadvice.org.uk. We‘re especially keen to hear from advisers with accessibility needs and advisers who use assistive technology. You can follow our progress on We are Citizens Advice.
