Accessibility Evaluation
@Cook County Government
In 2018, at MyReBuiltLife, we began to focus on engaging adjudicated youth while shifting away from adult user pipelines like Illinois Department of Corrections and Cook County Jail. Foundational research had demonstrated to our team that impaired literacy and visual impediments were the hallmarks of our adult online accessibility but with youth users joining, we needed to ensure the experience still met their expectations for an engaging digital experience and that modifications to the accessibility plan were identified and implemented.
Background and Goals
With our project goals of improving the customer journey in mind, we were careful during this process to evolve the product without impeding usage by adding weight to the site. We identified the steps we would need to take as: Classify all of the existing accessibility measures by importance to older users, determine youth level of site engagement through objective and subjective validation, cross reference and eliminate accessibility measures that create conflict unless priority items, re-affirm no loss of engagement and no additional impediments for older users.
Foundational Research Goals
1. Identify opportunities to maximize youth user experience.
2. Clarify current site accessibility needs based on changing demographics of user base.
3. Maintain ease of use through elimination of non necessary components, features or verbage.
Design Research Goals
I1. Maximize existing user flows to accommodate evolving youth segment user needs
2. Design to engage youth users through voice, images and features
3. Validate accessibility with adult users.
Methods
We researched two groups of users for this project. Usability reports allowed us to baseline and re-assess our older users to ensure changes did not adversely affect their experience. Our youth users were the subjects of contextual walkthroughs to establish their baseline navigational ability on the site and surveys to understand their prioritized needs. Eye tracking and surveys conducted on both groups confirmed engagement with the accessibility measures we refined.
Crucial Insights
The literacy levels for youth users are much higher than those of our users who are adults (18+ years) so the vocabulary adjustments for meeting their needs was relatively easy. By prioritizing the accessibility measures that had value to our older users, we were able to achieve our goals of maintaining site accessibility without adding more weight or degrading their engagement levels while shifting accessibility to meet our evolving user base's needs.
Our adult users had the distinctly large gaps in many cases, between their reported satisfaction with their experience on the site, usually high, but then participation in an objective measure like eye tracking would reveal non-reported process impediments, making the objective measurement a diagnostic tool for our team.
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Knowledge Takeaways
1. Youth have a far better mastery of technology than adults in general.
2. Usability reports take 1.5x-2x longer when people have literacy issues.
3. Users using accessible systems desire feature continuity.
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