Accessibility guidelines for the Dixa customer friendship platform
I read the European Accessibility Act so the rest of the team didn't have to.
How it started
The European Accessibility Act was a directive passed by the EU in 2019 which aimed to improve the lives of persons with disabilities and elderly people by creating a set of standards for accessible products and services in the EU market.
By the year 2025, all companies with products and services provided in the EU need to prove that they have taken sufficient steps to ensure that those products and services are accessible to all users.
Building on a strong foundation
I took the success criteria created by The A11Y Project , which consists of 64 items over 16 categories and rewrote them to 50 rules spread over 9 categories: ▶️ Animation; 🎨 Appearance; 📝 Content; 🧑💻 Code; 🔗 Controls; 📋 Forms; ⌨️ Keyboard; 🌄 Media; and 📱 Mobile;
Rewriting them like this made them easier to digest at once, removed or combined duplicate items, and separating them into distinct categories that would make finding the relevant rules for a particular design easy to find.
Not just what, but why and how.
Our accessibility guidelines not only tell us what we need to do, but why we need to do it, and how we can do it. It was important to our design philosophy to improve our understanding of our user's needs, and to provide clear examples of how they could be met.
Our accessibility guidelines also provide links to tools that can be used to check that the design meets meets that guideline. They also highlight important exceptions to rules, to avoid potential confusions when applying these rules.