How Covid-19 changed our approach to accessibility research
Rose Edmands and Kelly Garlick, The Care Quality Commission.
The pandemic has affected the way we work in many ways. For user research, an obvious change is not being able to conduct research face to face or contextually. Instead, we’ve had to quickly adapt to remote online tools to ensure we are still doing our research effectively.
Over the last 6 months at CQC we’ve been able to adapt to continually gain feedback on the online registration application, as part of the new service: ‘Register with CQC’. However, one thing we didn’t anticipate was the fact we found ourselves with no alternative but to conduct remote accessibility sessions with our users.
For accessibility sessions, normally the best way would be to go out to the user and visit them in their environment (whether this be at work or their home). This would enable us to get a rich picture of their needs, what tech they use, how they use it and to observe how the service in question works for them.
There was no question about whether we were going to do the sessions or not, we had a responsibility to make our service accessible and to do that, we had to explore how best this would work. This blog will outline how we’ve been conducting remote accessibility sessions, how this has worked for us and what we have found from our users so far.
Preparing to do remote accessibility research
To speak to users with reasonable adjustments or those that use assistive technology, we reached out internally within the CQC network to find volunteers to have a look at the new online registration service. This involved connecting with the Disability Equality Network at CQC, posting in our staff bulletin and spreading the word via word of mouth through our contacts. These different ways allowed us to contact many users within different channels.
It was also important we spoke to those with a range of disabilities (Cognitive, physical, Visual and auditory) but also those who use a range of assistive technologies varying in expertise and experience. As we wanted to gain feedback on the new online service, we set up a test environment to mimic how the service works in Private Beta.
During the remote session, we wanted the participant to be able to screen share on the video call and therefore we decided to trial out and use Microsoft Teams as the video conferencing tool to conduct our sessions. Other tools like Zoom were considered but for our sessions with internal users, it made sense to use Teams, a tool they had to use at CQC for their day to day work.
Conducting our research and what we’ve found out
So far, we have spoken to a couple of users who have learning difficulties (such as dyslexia), hearing difficulties, those who use voice recognition software (Dragon) and those who use screen readers (JAWS). We’re only at the beginning of our research but the feedback we have gained has been incredibly insightful and acts as a remainder as to why it’s so important to include a range of users when designing online services. We’ve discovered that some functionality on our online service, such as radio buttons, do not work well with screen-readers and make it very difficult for users to confidently select the correct option for them. Likewise, with voice recognition software, navigating around the page and selecting certain options, like the functionality to upload a document, proved difficult.
From our research sessions we’ve been able to flag any parts of the service that aren’t quite working well. We’ve spoken to various people within the team, such as our developers to check the coding and functionality, and business analysts for them to look into the requirements and further report changes needed. We’ve done this through regular research show and tells with the team and shared short video clips and quotes at larger ‘ceremony days’ to all the registration team, including stakeholders, to highlight these issues directly from our users. This has helped pin point the exact issue and help others understand the problems that users currently face.
In terms of how these sessions have ran remotely, we have been able to successfully screen share on Microsoft Teams with user’s assistive technology. We sent over a guide beforehand with instructions on how to screen share with an account or as a guest and talked users through this in the session if it was necessary. Likewise, we allowed time for the tech set up and therefore made our sessions longer to accommodate for this and to allow for any breaks if needed.
During the session, we have also been using a mix of concurrent think aloud and retrospective think aloud methodology, where we have observed users go through a couple of pages and then paused for some reflections and questions. This has worked well seeing how users naturally navigate the page without interrupting and avoided us potentially speaking over the assistive technology as well.
Takeaways
Although current times are challenging, I believe we have found a workaround for now in which this can work remotely (and rather successfully). Many of the same practises from face to face accessibility research can also be applied remotely but I think one of the key points is not to be ‘put off’ by this new way of working and conducting accessibility sessions. It’s important to recognise that, at the moment, we have been doing research with internal users at CQC and therefore the next stage would be to speak to external providers who will be registering in the future. Our accessibility research on registrations at CQC is ongoing, and we’re looking forward to speaking to more users to understand how we can continue to make our service accessible and inclusive for all.
