Accessibility first

Context

The language learning platform of Speexx has various exercises, including pages where users have to read a text (magazine page) or watch a video (video pages). The design of these two exercises wasn’t able to accomplish the AA level of accessibility provided by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which is why Speexx decided to update this part of the portal. Additionally, this was also seen as an opportunity to build a new visual design direction for the rest of the products.

Challenge

Being the first user experience designer at the company added an extra and exciting challenge to me because I needed to build trust with stakeholders (Product Management and Development team) on the importance of design. The direct project was to build a strong new visual language direction and introduce “accessibility first” as the primary criteria for designing and improving the product.

Research

Firstly, I started with secondary research on accessibility. Part of that was to put the company’s mission and vision into a visual concept. Secondly, we interviewed internal and external stakeholders to learn how they perceive Speexx.

The research concluded that:

• users were distracted from elements that were not related to their learning task;
• there was not enough contrast on the pages;
• there was no clear distinction between titles, captions and paragraphs;
• the text was aligned in a way that was hard to read for users.
• No all functionalities were usable with the keyboard – Keyboard compatibility.

Design

Two of Speexx’s portal pages needed to be updated to meet accessibility criteria. This also enabled Speexx to start defining a new design direction for the portal. Through wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes, we were able to conduct internal usability tests to lay a foundation for improvements in the rest of the portal.

Results

The new design of the magazine and video page tackled the issues discovered in the research phase while also meeting the AAA and AA accessibility criteria.