Harvard Business Review Explores Product Accessibility Best Practices
In a powerful article about how companies fail people with disabilities, Harvard Business Review highlights a number of important accessibility best-practices that address common errors including:
- Expecting users to do the lion’s share of development work of a new product
- Under-resourcing accessibility maintenance
- Failure to address accessibility throughout the entire customer experience
- Not integrating accessibility into internal workflows
At Cognitopia, we learned a lot from this article and found encouragement in a number of things that have long been a part of our design and development process. Our creation of self-management tools for people with cognitive disabilities has continually benefited from the open and deep involvement of its user base. For instance, we have a close collaboration with school district transition students who meet with us weekly to provide design input and usability feedback.
That partnership means building your product out in the open, involving a diverse community of users from the earliest stages. Allow for a continual, positive feedback-iteration loop where users see the results each time and are let in on your thinking about why decisions were made.
– Harvard business review, 4 Common Ways Companies Alienate People with Disabilities by Cat Noone, Nov 29, 2021
There are many useful nuggets of accessibility wisdom to be had in this short, five-minute read. Enjoy!
