It can be difficult knowing where, when, or how to approach web and mobile accessibility.
To help kick start this process and find the best approach for your project, or organisation, I provide a range of user research and consultancy services that can be mixed, matched or tweaked to suit your specific requirements.
Services
User Research
I will help you find the most effective way to engage with your disabled users, as well as capture and fully incorporate their feedback into your product or service design and development cycle, or strategy. User research methods typically include:
Focus groups
Holding open, structured discussions with a select group of your users to answer questions about an existing or new product, service, idea or strategy.
Testing
Inviting your target audience to work through a series of core task, or freely use and feedback on a product prototype, or the real thing.
Depth interviews
Conducting one-to-one interviews with users, staff or stakeholders to gain rich, detailed data that can be used to find trends and inform requirements, design, development or strategy.
Persona creation
Building realistic user profiles based on in-depth interviews, which represent the disabled, elderly or less advantaged users in your target audience.
Diary studies
Gaining a true insight into the behaviour, habits, hobbies, reactions, likes and dislikes of your users by asking them to keep audio, video, photo, online or paper diaries of specific events.
User panel
Recruiting a representative group of users from your target audience, who will be invited to regularly participate in feedback, user research or design sessions, throughout the year.
Expert Evaluation
By putting myself in the shoes of the user, I will evaluate your web product or service. I will 'walkthrough' the site, evaluating it against industry best practice, heuristics, WCAG 2.0, as well as applying my own experiences of disabled user requirements. You will receive a comprehensive report, which will highlight any potential accessibility issues and provide recommendations on how to resolve them.
Workshops and facilitation
Whether it's to address a problem, find a solution or increase your knowledge, workshops are a creative, fun and effective way to approach web and mobile accessibility. They provide a great opportunity for teams to share ideas, skills, experiences, knowledge, stories, views and make decisions in a enjoyable, task-focused environment. Typical workshops may take the following forms:
Testing debrief
Reviewing results from accessibility testing and translating them into achievable, prioritised goals and creative user experience solutions.
Accessibility governance and strategy development
Bringing relevant best practice, industry standards, legislation and research to the table, which will inform, build and shape an agreed strategic approach that's relevant to the accessibility of your product, project, department or organisation.
Project debrief
Performing an honest evaluation of what went well, what didn't go so well, the lessons learnt and then planning how to share the knowledge to benefit future projects.
Project planning
Integrating accessibility into every stage of the design and development cycle, from day one. Using user research, as well as 'lessons learnt' to agree aspect of the project in advance including roles, responsibilities, priorities, non-functional requirements, testing schedules, through to sketching user journeys or even first draft designs.
Personas and user goals
Focusing of the core proposition of the product or service, and developing stories about the types of people who may be interested in using it as well as how, and why they might use it. This is an effective way to define a target audience, create user stories, scenarios and use cases as a collaborative project team.
Design and interaction
Traditionally, accessibility and creativity haven't been viewed as a natural partnership. This is a great opportunity to bring them together via a collaborative design forum, using a variety of creative materials and methods such as card sorting, sketching, mood boards, breakout groups, brainstorming or blue sky thinking.
Coaching
Providing hands-on support to individuals or teams with the challenges of fully integrating accessibility into web products. This may involve attending product design, devlopment or project management meetings to facilitate discussions and help find solutions. Accessibility coaching can be particularly useful for Agile project management teams at the start of a project. Coaching can also take place online or over the phone.
Guardianship
Tailored to organisations, large or small, that do not have a dedicated accessibility specialist and need ad hoc support. For example, you may want wireframes or pages checked for issues before they go live, a realistic test plan created for a product or service, to commission accessibility work, or to simply discuss queries that have arisen on a project. This is a convenient way to address, manage and ensure that accessibility is maintained.
If you wish to discuss any of these consultancy services in more detail, or would like some guidance to find the best fit for your project or organisation, then please contact
Inclusive Experience.
