research-article

“It could be better. It could be much worse”: Understanding Accessibility in User Experience Practice with Implications for Industry and Education

Authors:

Cynthia Putnam,

Craig M. MacDonaldAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, Volume 16, Issue 1

Article No.: 9, Pages 1 - 25

https://doi.org/10.1145/3575662

Published: 28 March 2023 Publication History

Abstract

While accessibility is acknowledged as a crucial component in design, many technologies remain inaccessible for people with disabilities. As part of a study to better understand UX practice to inform pedagogy, we analyzed 58 interview sessions that included 65 senior user experience (UX) professionals and asked them “How do you consider accessibility in your work?” Using transitivity analysis from critical discourse analysis, our findings provide insight into the disparate practices of individuals and organizations. Key findings include the growing role of design systems to structurally address accessibility and the range of organizational strategies, including dedicated teams. We also found that the categories of accessibility consideration were somewhat superficial and largely focused on vision-related challenges. Additionally, our findings support previous work that many practitioners did not feel their formal education adequately prepared them to address accessibility. We conclude with implications for education and industry, namely, the importance of implementing and teaching design systems in human-computer interaction and computer-science programs.

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Cited By

Pivin-Bachler Jvan den Broek EGomez R(2024)Handling sensory disabilities in a smart societyJournal of Smart Cities and Society10.3233/SCS-2300193:1(3-21)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.3233/SCS-230019
Rose ETurner H(2023)Trust the Process: A Scalable Model for UX PedagogyJournal of Technical Writing and Communication10.1177/00472816231210234Online publication date: 6-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1177/00472816231210234
Hadadi SSarsenbayeva ZKay J(2023)Starting well on design for accessibility: analysis of W3C's 167 accessibility evaluation tools for the design phaseProceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3597638.3614474(1-7)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597638.3614474

Index Terms

“It could be better. It could be much worse”: Understanding Accessibility in User Experience Practice with Implications for Industry and Education
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Accessibility
    1. Empirical studies in accessibility

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing Volume 16, Issue 1

March 2023

322 pages

ISSN:1936-7228

EISSN:1936-7236

DOI:10.1145/3587922

Editors:
Tiago Guerreiro
Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
,
Stephanie Ludi
University of North Texas, USA

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 March 2023

Online AM: 15 December 2022

Accepted: 08 November 2022

Revised: 27 September 2022

Received: 03 January 2022

Published in TACCESS Volume 16, Issue 1

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Cited By

Pivin-Bachler Jvan den Broek EGomez R(2024)Handling sensory disabilities in a smart societyJournal of Smart Cities and Society10.3233/SCS-2300193:1(3-21)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.3233/SCS-230019
Rose ETurner H(2023)Trust the Process: A Scalable Model for UX PedagogyJournal of Technical Writing and Communication10.1177/00472816231210234Online publication date: 6-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1177/00472816231210234
Hadadi SSarsenbayeva ZKay J(2023)Starting well on design for accessibility: analysis of W3C's 167 accessibility evaluation tools for the design phaseProceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3597638.3614474(1-7)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597638.3614474

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