User experience fails aren't just inconvenient. When it comes to accessibility they're life-altering. Molly Burke's revealing demonstration in this video of an audio description device control app exposes the frustrating reality visually impaired users might face.

The accessibility improvement story, however, lies deeper. Product development processes sometimes prevent skilled people from creating good (accessible) products. This article examines how systemic, organizational, and individual factors set the stage for the success or failure of accessibility efforts before they even begin.

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TL;DR

Context: Molly Burke demonstrated shortcomings in an app that controls a device vision-impaired people use to enjoy movies.

• Systemic, organizational, and individual shortcomings likely contributed to this experience (as is so often the case in “bad” software).
• An experienced practitioner can make and evaluate expertise-informed hypotheses, then recommend ways to mitigate the contributing factors at each level.
• Skilled people often make good decisions within their part of a process that nevertheless contribute to an unsatisfactory outcome.
• Any single participant in the overall system can act to improve the outcome.

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People rarely set out intentionally to create bad products. We could assume the app's creators were unaware, indifferent, or suffering from an inconceivably profound lack of empathy and imagination. It's also tempting to believe that involving a blind person in the app design process alone would have made the difference. However, given the way software and hardware systems tend to be developed and tested, it's possible that systemic, organizational, or individual factors had as much if not more effect on the app's demonstrated lack of utility.

So what else might have led to Molly's experience?

Possible causes

These are experience-informed conjectures based on my years working at the intersection of product management, user experience, and software development. I don't have first-hand knowledge of how the app in the video was created. It's possible, though, to make several hypotheses about what some of the contributing factors might have been.

Systemic Factors

1. Disconnect among the three main parties involved: the movie theater, the audio delivery technology company, and the audio description service provider. No one seems to be considering how all the elements work together to create an effective solution.
2. Advocacy groups and academic institutions might not be effectively integrated into the system that provides audio descriptions to end users.

Organizational Factors

An audio description provider might be focused on producing high-quality descriptions, not on the system that delivers the descriptions.

Advocacy groups and academic institutions might not include control apps when they research, evaluate, review, or recommend audio description systems.

A the system supplier might have

1. extended an existing product intended for hearing-impaired moviegoers by adding support for audio descriptions without reevaluating how users interact with the app.
2. assumed one of the other companies had ensured the app worked well for vision-impaired people. (Theater chain and audio description provider assume the system vendor has made its product fit for purpose.)
3. not hired or consulted any people with user experience or accessible software design and implementation expertise.
4. not understood the limits of a visual designer's contribution to app design
5. not done any user research
6. not required the app team to know or implement accessibility features and best practices
7. outsourced app development without including accessible development practices in statements of work, requirements, or acceptance criteria.
8. assumed everyone who can install their app can and do use inbuilt screen readers.
9. assumed that an inbuilt screen reader would work with their app without any specific design or implementation needed.
10. not accounted for possible third-party screen reader use
11. believed that voice control and magnification tools would supplement an inbuilt screen reader to create a solution that would meet the needs of most users.
12. been unaware of or didn't want t(o invest in using accessibility features in the app implementation.

Individual Factors

1. Individuals might have assumed that people with vision impairments are always accompanied by sighted companions and that it's acceptable to expect them to rely on those companions to use the app.
2. App developers
   
   1. might not have known about the characteristics app code needs in order to work with screen readers.
   2. might operate in a software development culture that literally follows a provided spec without raising questions about the intended use or the sufficiency of the requirements.
3. Product managers might have been more hardware and telecommunications focused, lacking a sufficient understanding of the software component of their product.
4. Everyone might have assumed that “someone else” was going to know, require, apply, and test that the app implemented the correct accessibility characteristics.
5. The theater chain's technology buyers
   
   1. didn't include the app's accessibility in their system selection criteria.
   2. didn't evaluate actual app usability. For example, by not requiring a demo, not asking about the vendor's steps to ensure fitness for purpose, doing system demos that don't include a blind person performing the app connection step, etc.
6. People might not have observed the app's behavior when using a screen reader.
7. Designers might have assumed that if the app could be operated in a dark theater then a blind person could also use it.

Possible solutions

There are a range of interventions that target specific weak points in the development process. From quick wins to enduring improvements, cost-effective solutions and high-impact changes can transform how accessibility is integrated into product development.
The right mix of solutions will vary depending on the unique challenges observed in each process.

Interventions might include one or more of the following:

• leadership awareness
• budgeting (of money and time)
• changing hiring criteria and practices to recruit and hire people with any one or more of
  
  • lived experience
  • user experience (not visual design) skills
  • software design and implementation for accessibility
  • empathy, curiosity, and imagination
• hiring (in this example) vision-impaired people
• making the software part of a hardware+software product (system) a first-class target of product design and testing.
• engaging appropriatley qualified consultants,
• upskilling everyone involved in the end-to-end process,
• making user experience research and design specifically involving vision-impaired people a non-negotiable part of the product development process

How to know how to improve?

Based on my experience as a process analyst, product manager, and user experience practitioner, there seem to be many, many, possible causes for Molly's experience. If I were asked to advise a company about how to improve their accessibility efforts, (distinct from improving the app's accessibility ) here are some things I'd do:

• develop experience-based hypotheses such as the above.
• conduct an open-ended exploration to systematically evaluate them and identify more or different causes.
• use the most lightweight methods possible to perform that discovery and recommend interventions designed to create the improvement needed.
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To sum up

• Consult a person experienced in how software is created to identify process improvement opportunities.
  > The process of creating creating and bringing to market an app or combined hardware+software product is complicated, but susceptible to improvement by a reasonably skilled person who can map product objectives to the systems and processes used to deliver the product.
• Very often big improvements come from modifying just a few key insufficiencies that people involved in the process can't see but that an outside perspective can identify.
• Real lasting improvement can be made with readily available and easily implemented interventions (once the people involved are aware of the shortfall and have a desire to do better).