Beyond Accessibility Compliance: Building the Next Generation of Inclusive Products

Take a deep look at accessibility as it applies to mobile and wearables. This book covers topics within the accessibility domain that are rarely covered or understood, despite the fact that nearly half of the world’s population uses smartphones. Moreover, by 2025, 72% of smartphone users are expected to only use smartphones to access the internet. And yet, accessibility is often an afterthought instead of a core principle of product development. This book changes that.

You will begin by exploring the current landscape and policy frameworks, looking at the software product lifecycle and how to embed inclusion from the start. You’ll learn the nuances of mobile accessibility as it applies to mobile devices, wearables, and IoT. From there you’ll move onto automated testing, accessibility and inclusion, and the next frontiers of emerging technology including AR and VR. There will be notes at the end of programming examples to help those in orthogonal roles, such as project management, understand the basics and the language to better communicate with their engineering counterparts.

Over 1 billion people in the world live with some form of disability so it's imperative you devise a comprehensive game plan to make your digital products accessible for all. Beyond Accessibility Compliance is your guide to understanding the current landscape of assistive technology and how emerging techniques are changing the way we think about personalization and accessibility.

What You Will Learn

• See how people with the most common forms of disabilities use digital products
• Review the basics of the product development lifecycle and how to embed accessibility
• Explore tangible answers as to how accessibility pertains to unique roles
• Understand the difference between compliance and usability
• Make data visualizations accessible for blind users
• Implement code-level changes to address gaps in accessibility
• Build a campus programs and course material inclusive for people with disabilities

Who Is This Book For

Current developers, designers, and others building technology products with basic knowledge of front-end development. This book is also suitable for students in computer science, engineering, HCI, and related fields. Sections that are not engineering-specific are applicable to design, user research, communication, and business students who are looking to pursue careers in technology.

About the Author

Sukriti Chadha is a mobile developer turned product manager who currently works at Spotify. She is the only product manager responsible for accessibility across all platforms. Additionally, she works on scalable mobile infrastructure to enable reliable shipping of Spotify’s mobile apps to its over 300 million users globally. Sukriti started as a mobile developer at Yahoo Finance in 2016. When her father lost vision in one of his eyes due to complications from diabetes, it inspired her to patent, launch and open source technology that allows people with visual impairments to use charts and interpret data using music, haptics, and voice synthesis. She also developed a system for haptic navigation for people with hearing impairments.

Sukriti is an invited expert at W3C with WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), as well as the Mobile Accessibility Task Force, the industry working group that sets the guidelines that are the ISO standard for accessibility and the basis for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Her work has been presented at several conferences including CSUN (the largest annual accessibility conference), A Future Date Conference, Product-Led Festival, Mobile Growth by Branch.io, and MProduct Con. Her project on automated mobile testing for accessibility also won the Product-Led Alliance award for the most impactful project.

Sukriti is an active member of Teach Access, a collaboration of accessibility experts, industry leaders and academics with companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Wal-Mart to further the understanding of inclusion and accessibility among high-school and college students. As part of this initiative, she regularly collaborates with university professors who have expressed a desire to have a book like this as foundation for their design and CS courses.

She has been invited as a judge for innovation awards at CES (Consumer Electronics Show); Remarkable Accelerator, Australia; and Pursuit Hackathon. She also regularly peer reviews academic papers for HCI and accessibility journals including ICETM, Web4All and the 32nd Annual Australian HCI Conference.

Sukriti has a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and certificate in Finance from Princeton University. She is also a private pilot and certified yoga instructor.