CFIT User Experience
Meet people with disabilities, find out how they use your product or service and talk with them about their experiences.
Benefits
- The best way to learn about what accessibility really means in practice;
- Gives you an insight into disabled users' needs and how design features relate to their abilities;
- Reveals whether your product or service works as you intended;
- Works for websites, software applications, consumer products, and much more;
- Helps designers get into the mind of their users and demystifies accessibility guidelines.
Accessibility can appear daunting and complicated. How can you cater for such a wide range of abilities and disabilities? What do people with disabilities actually need in order to use your product or service?
Relax, it's not really that difficult. A little experience of how people with disabilities use technologies like yours can go a long way toward demystifying accessibility, making it a known entity that you can tackle with confidence.
In a CFIT User Experience session, you can meet people with disabilities, observe them using your own product or service and discuss their experiences with them. This will give you significant insights into their needs and how to provide for them. A CFIT accessibility consultant will be on hand to help you turn these insights into a concrete plan of action.
"My team are new to accessibility and had no real understanding of the issue. They left with a real insight into the challenges that they now face." – Eamon Martin, Online Content & Development Specialist, Permanent TSB.
So why not come in and see for yourself? After this experience, you will be in a much better position to understand what's required and will be able to interpret technical accessibility guidelines in a practical way, for the benefit of your users and your business.
What do you get?
A typical session consists of a half day visit to CFIT's dedicated facility in Drumcondra, Dublin, for up to 3 of your implementation team. We suggest the project manager, a senior developer and perhaps your access officer or customer services manager.
First of all, you will get to meet one or two typical users with disabilities. They will describe how they use technologies such as yours and the barriers they face. With computer software, websites and online applications, they will be able to demonstrate the assistive technologies that enable them to interact with it.
You will sit with the users while they carry out real tasks using your product or service, discuss their experiences with them and get input into how the product or service might be designed to work better for them. Alternatively, you can observe and listening remotely from the comfort of our purpose-built observation room, where you will be able to discuss what's going on and take notes without disturbing the users, so what you are seeing will be totally real.
By doing this, you will find out what they find difficult and why, what the overall experience is like for them and how it might be improved. Our user testers are experienced in using technologies, so they will be able to demonstrate and discuss specific issues and give guidance on what works and what doesn't. A senior CFIT accessibility consultant will be present to facilitate the discussions and help you explore and understand any problems that arise and how to avoid them.
"This experience would definitely encourage me to involve people with a disability in the development and formal testing processes." – Brian Farrell, Executive Officer, Equality Tribunal.
If you have not had the opportunity to meet and observe a real user test before, we are confident you will find it a valuable and enlightening experience.
What happens next?
The CFIT User Experience is a great first step. It will give you a greater understanding of the user experience and a good basis to plan and undertake the accessibility work in your project with confidence.
You may decide to combine the User Experience session with a full accessibility audit, to give you a more complete picture of what work needs to be done. Or you might choose to run formal user testing or field trials so that you can learn more about how the design affects a wider range of users. If you want to go ahead with your development without further assessment, CFIT can help you by providing a flexible consultancy package of support, mentoring and 'help desk' facilities on an ongoing basis, according to your needs. This will help you to quickly develop your own in-house accessibility expertise.
What does it cost?
A half day User Experience session costs €450. As NCBI is a registered charity, we do not charge VAT, so this is the final price.