Interview with Nadia Rasul, a Digital Accessibility Expert

Michelle Peña
Nov 17, 2021
8 min read

An Interview with a Digital Accessibility Expert

Reason One is a digital marketing agency located in Toronto, Ontario that has a major focus on accessible design. They offer many services including branding, digital strategy, content strategy, web design, web development and digital marketing, just to name a few. Reason One believes the web is for everyone and strives to create a better digital experience for people with disabilities. You can check out Reason One’s website here to learn more.

On November 5th, we had the pleasure of speaking with Nadia Rasul, the Accessibility Lead at Reason One. She shared lots of insight about digital accessibility, as well as tips and tricks to make your website more accessible.

How do you define accessibility and why should people care about it?

According to Nadia, “Accessibility, or web accessibility in particular is the practice of making sure that you're providing a truly inclusive experience to all your users, and you're removing any barriers for different types of users on the web. Whether there are people who might have motor disabilities, visual disabilities, and cognitive disabilities, you have to make sure that you're including all of them”. As for why people should care, Nadia explains that about 20% of the world’s population experiences a form of disability and you should expect that some users of your website might be experiencing a permanent or temporary disability. She makes sure to point out that in addition to the blind and wheelchair-bound, disabilities can be situational. This can include someone who has fractured their wrist, individuals with concussions, as well as someone who is trying to use car navigation with a glare. The aging population also needs accessibility features, as some experience motor, or cognitive issues. Nadia concludes that typical disabilities, as well as situational disabilities, need to be considered in order to provide an inclusive experience to all. This ensures everyone will be able to easily access the content, and use the functionality features.

As the Accessibility Lead, what are your main roles and responsibilities at Reason One?

As the Accessibility Lead, Nadia helps “set the standard for the company, including standards that we're going to follow for our own website, but also for any work that we're producing for our client”. She also has many other responsibilities including running a working group that meets each week to learn, share ideas and increase their knowledge on accessibility. In addition to the working group, Nadia aids the Reason One studio with lunch and learns, quick wins of the month, blog posts, and research and development work. Lastly, Nadia evaluates accessibility testing tools, establishes a process for running accessibility audits and supports Reason One’s product teams. Nadia explains that, “Whether I'm a part of that project or not, I'm still responsible for supporting those teams for any consultations if they have questions, or are talking to our clients, and helping them understand the importance of the value of making accessible websites”.

What are both your and your company's main goals with regards to accessibility and which accessibility guidelines do you use?

Nadia explains that because Reason One is based in Toronto, they follow AODA, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. More specifically, Reason One follows WCAG level AA for all websites and products they produce. In terms of Reason One’s goals, she makes sure to point out that accessibility is more than just following the guidelines. Nadia says, “For us, it's not just about following any legal standard because, yes it’s important to meet compliance, but compliance isn't the only objective. You have to pair it up with best practices for inclusive design. Sometimes just following the technical standards isn't enough, and it doesn't necessarily guarantee an accessible user experience for everyone. You do need to make sure that you are following best practices to provide a truly usable site for everybody, so our goal is to go beyond the standards”.

How do you educate employees and clients about accessibility?

To educate internally throughout Reason One, Nadia describes their working group. This is a group of people, herself included, that are passionate about “learning accessibility for themselves, and for implementing it in their work”. Every week, they meet to discuss accessibility standards, accessibility news, and share their problems regarding accessibility. On a quarterly basis, the working group creates a lunch and learn event, where they educate the rest of the company on what they have learned. Nadia explains that they create quick wins of the month to summarize their findings, which are shared through Reason One’s Slack channel for people who cannot make the lunch and learn meetings. Additionally, they have a resource bank that includes tools such as learning resources, best practices, Reason One’s standards, and books regarding accessibility.

To educate clients, Nadia explains, “We start bringing accessibility into the conversation from the very start and we tell them why it is important for us to create an accessible website. Because we work mostly with clients that are very purpose-driven, in the nonprofit sector and healthcare, and in Ontario accessibility is a legal requirement for most clients, they understand why they need to provide an inclusive experience. Even if they're not legally obligated to meet any standard, they are able to understand that we provide them with any resources that might help them”. She mentions that it is very rare for the accessibility team to be stern with clients about accessibility because they understand the importance of being inclusive. Additionally, Nadia points out that after building and launching the client’s website, Reason One provides them with guidelines for maintaining their accessibility. This includes new content and features added to the website in the future.

What are the biggest challenges consumers face in terms of digital accessibility and how can they be resolved?

Nadia outlines four major challenges that consumers face in regards to accessibility: colour contrast, improper focus states, missing alt text and missing form labels. She notices that many websites lack colour contrast in their text, images and interactive components, such as buttons, links and form fields. This can be detrimental to users who are visually impaired. Additionally, many websites are missing focus states, which is a ring outside certain elements that is shown when you click on it, or when you're using your keyboard to tab an element. Nadia describes that Chrome has a solid black focus state, Firefox has a faint dotted line and safari has a glowing blue one. However, she explains that “designers or developers will turn that off without thinking about how that might impact a user who's just using a keyboard and doesn't know where their focus is”. Missing alt text is another key challenge that Nadia points out. She describes, “If you don't give an alt text, and the user is using a screen reader, all they're going to hear is either nothing or they might hear the actual name of the file”. The last challenge Nadia mentions are missing form labels. She illustrates that designers tend to put placeholder text inside the text box instead of a visual label on top, which is not enough. According to Nadia, it is necessary to have a label on top of each field. To solve these issues, Nadia points out that you must fix what’s missing, or have an alternative if you are turning a feature off. She concludes with, “Think about it from the point of view of users who might be using different forms of assistive technologies, whether it's just a keyboard, a screen reader, or refreshable braille”.

What are some common barriers to accessibility that are ingrained in popular design, and how is it possible to change them, if at all?

During our interview, Nadia made sure to remind us about the importance of contrast within design. She stated that it was important to ensure that designers are “not using colour as the only way of giving important information”. This is super important as many designers focus more on making their media attractive while putting aside concerns for accessibility, while anything can be both beautiful and accessible so long as there is some thought put into it. With increased contrast, people with visual impairments and even those with tired eyes can easily see important information. There is also the issue of focus spaces which are sometimes removed, very subtle, or don’t communicate any issues, but when added are incredibly useful. Any accessibility barriers are able to be broken down with simple solutions on behalf of the designers.

How does Reason One test the accessibility of their website to ensure it is inclusive to as many people as possible?

Reason One makes sure that they put the user experience first during their concept production so that they don’t need to make too many changes to the end product. Continuous considerations like “checking contrast, making sure there are labels, [that] the content is structured and organized in a way that it's logical and easy to understand for people” are vital to make websites with minimal barriers to accessibility. During development, Reason One uses semantic HTML and conducts tests prior to doing proper quality checks. Nadia said that their team checks everything over manually via keyboard testing as well as with screen readers to find places where improvements could be made. Another method that helps to evaluate the accessibility of websites is the WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool), which is a “suite of tools” that accesses a site and provides a list of possible issues within a site’s components. However, if anything happens to fall through the cracks it is always possible to come back and fix user reported issues.

Are there any parts of accessible design that can be detrimental to the overall user experience?

Nadia made it clear that accessible design being unattractive was a common misconception, and that many people have an idea that it doesn’t have to be a “plain text website website with those blue links and [a] very 90’s feeling kind of websites with no personality to it.” The main “functionality related things are hidden underneath” and are virtually invisible to visitors who aren’t using screenreaders, a keyboard, or other accessibility tools. This means that websites can be both fully functional and visually appealing for every user while making no compromises. It’s super important to work on getting over these misconceptions since they can block overall progress. Overall, there’s nothing bad that could come from adding accessibility, so why not do it?

What are the most simple ways that you can enhance accessibility?

Some of the easiest ways to enhance accessibility include having alternative text for photos or videos, making any features that work with a mouses’ click or hover work with a keyboard as well, and our beloved high contrast is always an easy way to help visual accessibility. Errors on forms should also be “written out in text associated with the field as well” to ensure clarity for everyone, and semantic button elements can immediately provide a lot of accessibility- “you don't have to do any additional work to make it accessible and usable” which can give you more time to work on other parts of your site.

What advice would you give to small businesses who want to create an accessible website?

Nadia strongly recommends planning out accessible websites early on in order to make sure that you don’t have to come back later on to fix too much: it can take “ a lot more time and money to remediate your website afterwards” and could stop visitors from being able to fully access your content. Instead, she says that one should “make sure your content of the website it is simple, readable. grade A standard is the best standard to sort of fall for everybody”. Even if you don’t need to legally meet a standard, it is good practice to make it easy and possible for anyone who wants to use your site to do so. Particularly during the pandemic, there have been many vulnerable people who need access to information online, especially within the healthcare sector.

Thanks to Nadia’s helpful insight, we have gotten an inside perspective on what it is like to create accessible media through Reason One. We hope that reading about web accessibility from an expert will aid in your efforts to make your own digital media accessible to everyone.