The opportunity
We want to ensure all our services are compliant accessibility requirements, which is why we are thinking of ways to help our teams create and maintain compliant accessibility statements.
To solve this problem, we are building a service that will help users easily create and maintain accurate accessibility, so that people don't forget to put information in them.
Aims of the research
We created a prototype for the service using Figma and Lucid. During a regular design meet up, we reviewed the prototype and they gave us feedback on what we could improve.
User research preparation
We did a workshop with a senior user researcher to identify what we wanted to find out and how best to conduct the research. After that, we came together to create a discussion guide for the interviews and produce consent forms. The senior user researcher reviewed all our documentation and plans ahead of the research sessions. We book one-to-one sessions with users who agreed to take part, after putting a call out on DfE channels to recruit participants.
Participants
We interviewed 4 different people:
- product manager
- project manager
- senior content designer
- content designer
We found out how different teams manage their accessibility in their services.
Key findings
We discovered that a lot of people currently struggle to create accessibility statements due to lack of guidance. We also discovered that it was not a specific role that took responsibility for producing and maintaining accessibility statements. It was a lot of different roles that contributed.
We also discovered that people used templates to create accessibility statements. Those who did use templates, also shared they are unsure what you can and cannot edit in those statements, which also creates confusion.
Next steps
Next, we are going to organise some more user research interviews (usability testing and interviewing potential users) to help us understand who our users are and what they need and don’t need for the service. We will use the feedback from usability testing to improve the service.
We will also meet with a BA to organise tasks for the team to build the coded prototype in Visual Studio code.