We are the BT and EE Accessibility Team.
We provide expert guidance on how to make sure that everyone can access
digital services in any way, through inclusive
design best practices and accessibility
that guidance.
BT have made a strong commitment to ensure that
all our digital products are accessible to anyone, regardless of
age or disability.
Whether temporary or lifelong,
aging eyesight or blindness or broken arms
and legs due to an accident.
Disability can affect anyone at any point in their lives
not just in the physical world, but also in the digital realms.
From our perspective a large part of our work involves looking at mobile apps.
Such as the new EE app that we've been working on.
The team test the app with technical compliance software, but also
using assistive technology, which is basically the fancy
way of saying - the hardware and software used by
people with disabilities.
For me personally, I've been completely blind from birth,
but that hasn't stopped me accessing the digital world around me.
I use something called a screen reader
that reads out everything that's on my screen on all of
my devices.
Here's how that works on the iPhone, for example.
What we can see on screen now is my iPhones home screen. Now for
me as someone who's completely blind. The iPhone
is
just a flat piece of glass really. It's a fully touchscreen
device with very few physical buttons
tactile controls.
So, how do I use it? Well, I've got
voiceover running which is Apple's built-in screen
reader. So I can navigate this device by using
a series of gestures and shortcuts
on the touch screen. The most basic
one - I can do a flick to the right with one finger
and that will move me sequentially
through every element on the page. So every app on my
home screen in this case. It will move me left to right through every app going down
the rows as well when he needs to.
Find my
Shortcuts
iTunes Store
Translate
Let's go into the My EE app.
My EE double tap to open.
My EE home. Heading
Now this straightaway tells me that I'm on home and it's
a heading.
And this is important because
a screen reader user needs to know what their interacting
with. So they need to know whether it's a button
or a link or a heading, which is
of course non interactive. So let's have a
flick through this app and see how the different elements on the screen are read
out.
Back button. Profile button.
Bills and Payments button.
Orders button. Plans button.
Change product heading.
So they're all read out as buttons. We're here in two things there.
We're here in the element type which is button. And we're
also here in the label which is things like
the Bills and Payments the Plans the Orders
Profile etc. And these two things are very
important because they tell screen readers one
what the element is - so in this case they're buttons, which
means that I can double tap on these and they will do something - they're
interactive elements. And the second thing
is the label. So for example, I know that because of
the label of the button, I know that the Bills and Payments, I know exactly what
that button is going to do - it's going to take me to the Bills and Payments screen. It's
very common in some third party apps to hear just
button. So let's say you've got a search button,
you might visually see a little search icon
and a magnifying glass. But if that label
hasn't been written properly in the code, then screen reader user
is just gonna hear 'button' and they'll have no context of
what that button is, what they're about to do, where it's gonna take them. Likewise
with element types as well.
So sometimes you might have a case where you can see that
something is a link on a web page. But if they've not written
it as a link in the code, then screen readers and
other assistive technologies won't be able to pick that up. These elements
are also important for navigation because of course
the screen reader user could just flick left and right
between every element in the page, but it's not very efficient. It's
not very fast. So there are shortcuts that assistive technology
users can use to navigate around quicker and
more efficiently. On the iPhone, for example, there's something called the rotor
which can allow you to navigate by links, headings,
text fields - pretty much any element
that you want. So let's say for example, I don't want to go
through all this Bills and Payments and I don't
want to flick through all them buttons. I just want to navigate straight
to the change product heading. I can
just change my rotor to headings, characters, headings and
then a one finger flick up on this occasion. we'll join
me to the previous heading.
Change product, heading, Home heading. There's the
Home heading, which is where we started. I can flick
down.
Change Product heading and I'm straight to the
change product heading. So again, if this was
done in code and rather than being a proper heading it was
just for example put into a bigger font, then you would
break that level of efficiency for a screen reader
user because they wouldn't be able to navigate like it was an actual
heading.
From a visual perspective, as well as screen readers,
there's also a magnification that can be used by people
with low vision, the most well known example of this
is a product called zoomtext.
For colour blindness, and there are different types
of colour blindness.
There are many different tools and softwares out there that can
change the screen colors.
Many homes,
and even your smartphones, have voice assistant so
think of things like Google Assistant or Alexa or Siri.
But voice control is also important for those who physically can't use a
mouse or keyboard.
It's not long ago that these sorts of technologies started being
used by all of us.
But this sort of technology has been around for many years for people
with disabilities.
We cover all of these areas in our testing and more.