UX Case Study
Web Accessibility
Overview:
Redesigning the website needs for better inclusion, connection, accessibility with its audiences, including building a more intuitive information architecture and developing a coherent visual language.
This choice of subject involves a personal story, Around the start of July, I met a 81 year old lady (Vivan) and initially she just had doubts as to how to switch on the tablet someone just gifted her however after I helped her with that, she requested me teach her a bit about technology. That's when I looked at web accessibility among older people in a more precise way.
Masters Project /
Accessibility
Role /
UX Research, UI/ UX design
Discovery:
Around one fifth of the UK population (19%) was aged 65 or over in 2019, or around 12.3 million people making web accesibility for older users one of the priority. The design problem involved here is to provide an integrated system that is easy for older and computer native people to understand and use.
CQC:
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is an executive non-departmental public body of the Department of Health and Social Care of the United Kingdom. CQC monitors, inspect and regulates health and social care services. They publish the findings, including ratings to help people choose caring helps.
In this short project, I plan to analyse the current website, study the needs, goals and user-space. Redesigning the website needs for better inclusion, connection, accessibility including building a more intuitive information architecture and developing a coherent visual language, following the accessibility guidelines.
Goals:
The aims for the current website can be summarized as : To monitor, inspect and rate healthcare services, to protect the people using these services, provide information, support and options to the service users and to the healthcare workers, share views on quality issues in health and social care. These goals and secondary data helped me narrow down the users as: healthcare workers, service users, secondary users ( related to service users) and organisations. The next step is to analyse the needs and pain points for these direct/indirerent users at the same time, compare the usability issues for them and highlighting the current trends, problem spaces.
User Research:
In order to empathize with the different types of users, I developed so-called proto-personas, which are based purely on experience and assumptions. These serve as a starting point to reflect on the needs and challenges of the user and possible solutions that can be considered later in building the information architecture.
To synthesise all the findings, I used the Affinity Map exercise. After mapping, all the findings I could easily notice the user’s behaviour patterns and pain points.
Challenge Space:
A great user experience offers clear, logical paths to information, with the right content and messaging delivered at the right stages of a customer journey. While analysis the CQC website I found some of the challenges from usability, accessibility and navigation point of view, such as Too many menus or menu options: a unclear menu can lead to confusing the user and also create navigation issues , rabbit hole navigation, poor visual content, some of the content options on the about us and home page do not define the link and non-links making it diffcult for the users, no audience segmentation, issues with user friendly UI: the current UI follows an outdated style, thus ignoring accessibility guidelines, incorrect or ignored optimization, pages loading time, too much text and non-responsive -layout resolution.
Redesign for accessibility (User Experience):
Studying the govt. Accessibility and design guidelines, I wanted to create a sample redesigned page to compare and analyse it better. Some of the highlights in the changes include:
-
Increased Color Contrast: Text needs to contrast with its background enough for users with low vision and colour blindness to be able to read it. Previously, some of the text in the CQC theme had low contrast to pass WCAG 2.0 AA standards. I used WebAIM Contrast Checker to narrow down the theme and select the accessible combinations.
-
Better Fond Legibility: I knew from the beginning that certain fonts are harder to read than others. Font focused perspective led me to realise the font difference/ legibility in header and navigation.
-
Improved Keyboard-Only Navigation (planned): In some cases, users need to navigate the Web with a keyboard, rather than a mouse or touch screen. I plan to adjust semantic markup to make content easier to access when navigating solely with a keyboard or screen reader software.
Some of these changes also include adding a visible border around all links when a user tabs to them (Visible focus), also making menus easier to tab through.
-
Improved Semantic Markup (planned): A lot of accessibility needs can be addressed simply by using semantic markup- that is, using HTML markup that describes what content is and does instead of relying on a styled<div> or<span> tag for everything. By adjusting the use of heading tags from non-heading content, and adding < label> tags to the search form, the website can be turned more accessible and SEO-friendly.
-
Enhanced Functionality for Screen Readers (planned): Forcertain elements, I plan to enhance the screen reader experience with ARIA labels. Examples included adding ARIA accessibility labelling to “Read more” links across the platform to provide additional context to the link for screen reader users and adding labelling to page links to provide more context for where each “next” or ”back” link goes.
