How to avoid barriers in technology

How to avoid barriers in technology

Introduction 

Disabled people often encounter barriers to their full participation in society, related to their disability. These can arise from every aspect of society – including the technology we use. 

Organisations must understand how to reduce and remove barriers in technology to support disabled employees and welcome disabled customers. 

This resource discusses: 

• How to know what the users of your technology need 
• How to procure technology that works for them 
• How to make sure it continues to work 
• How to provide alternatives. 

We acknowledge that no technology will work for all users, so we also discuss how to provide alternatives where necessary. 

What are barriers? 

Disabled people sometimes need to do things differently because of their disability. Barriers exist where it is harder or impossible for a disabled person to do things in a way that works for them. 

For example, a wheelchair user experiences a barrier whenever a building requires them to use stairs to enter, without providing a lift or a ramp. An example of a technology-related barrier is a website that does not provide alt text for its images. People who use screen readers (for example, because they have sight loss) cannot, therefore, know what is in the picture. This presents a barrier which prevents them from using the website in fulll. 

In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 creates a legal duty for organisations to remove and reduce barriers by making ‘reasonable adjustments.’ In the case of the website above, this would mean adding alt text to images. 

Understand your users’ needs 

The barriers in any technology depend on the needs of the person using it. Equally, the technology you use may present barriers that you are not currently aware of. Therefore, to avoid barriers in technology, you need to understand you user’s needs and experiences with your organisation. 

Businesses should consult regularly with users of its technology – employees, customers, clients, service users, and any other users.  

There are many ways of doing this, and the most appropriate method will depend on your organisation’s situation. 

For staff, you could: 

• Conduct an Employee Opinion Survey 
• Consult with disability network groups 
• Analyse metrics related to workplace adjustments, such as volumes, costs, time taken, etc. 
• Obtain feedback on recruitment processes 

For customers, you could: 

• Conduct a survey of customers 
• Create feedback options on your website 
• Invite external experts and disabled user panels to test your products and services 
• Create an ‘accessibility/disability-related’ category in your customer complaints process. 

Our resources, ‘Staff consultation methods’ and ‘Customer consultation methods,’ outline some of the different approaches available. 

Procuring accessible technology 

After understanding your users’ needs, you can procure or create technologies with a stronger idea of what purpose it needs to fulfil and the ways in which disabled users need to be able to use it. 

Procurement is a vital process that is often overlooked in accessibility. Your organisation needs to put inclusive technology procurement at the centre of its procurement policies and practices. Otherwise, you will face costly retrofitting, delays due to people not being able to use the technology. You may even have to restart the procurement process, in order to get something that actually works for your users. 

• We have collected resources on procuring accessible technology in this Toolkit, in the section ‘Technology procurement.’
• Business Disability Forum Partners can also access our Procurement Toolkit. This contains detailed advice on procuring a range of different items, including technology. 

Testing for accessibility 

As an organisation, you are responsible for the accessibility of the technology you use. This includes the technology you procure (which may be most or all of it for many organisations). The only way to achieve this is through testing for accessibility. 

You should test new technologies during the procurement process. You should also regularly test throughout the lifecycle of technologies already in use.  

W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) defines accessibility testing as: 

“Web accessibility testing is a subset of usability testing where the users under consideration have disabilities that affect how they use the web. The end goal, in both usability and accessibility, is to discover how easily people can use a web site and feed that information back into improving future designs and implementations.” 

It is vital to test regularly during a product’s lifecycle because items can become inaccessible due to upgrades (either to it or to other products that users rely on to access it), bugs or flaws, or changes in the users’ needs. 

Our resource, ‘Accessibility testing,’ has more information. 

Providing alternatives 

You can do all the consulting, procurement and testing right, and still it is possible that someone may be unable to use the technology in question. 

This is to be expected – the nature of disability (and humanity) means that individuals’ needs are exactly that: individual. There will inevitably be cases where you need to provide alternative technology, and organisations should be prepared for this possibility. 

You may need to: 

• Provide alternative technologies – for example, if the user relies on assistive technology (AT) that is incompatible with the product in question, but is compatible with a similar alternative. This is only appropriate if it is reasonably possible to swap one item for another. 
• Provide alternative ways of achieving the same outcome – if it is not possible to provide alternative technologies that work for the individual, then seek other ways of achieving the same outcome. For example, if a customer needs to verify their identity over the phone, but they are deaf, look at other secure ways of verifying identity that do not rely on sound. 

Further information 

Our resource, ‘Assistive technology catalogues,’ has more information about the AT available and how organisations can deploy it effectively.