Find out about your users' accessibility needs

During the discovery phase of service delivery or when you are planning a project, you need to learn about your users' accessibility needs.

Begin with estimates of need

As a starting point, use the Estimate how many people using your website might be disabled tool to begin to understand how many of your users may have disabilities and the different types of disability that they may have.

You can use this estimate, along with your own knowledge of your user base, alongside the Accessibility Personas by the GDS Accessibility team in order to build a more complete picture of your users needs.

Do research to discover access needs

In order to fully understand the needs of your users, conduct user research in order to gather specific information about how your users will interact with your service, the environments and situations that they will be in, as well as the needs of individuals.

Each barrier that you do not remove from your service will exclude people from using it. It's important that following the discovery phase, that you have a clear understanding of the needs of your users and that you are able to define accessibility acceptance criteria within each sprint during development to ensure that you are developing a service that is accessible to as many people as possible.

Do not assume that your users have no access needs

It is not acceptable to believe that people using the service will not have a disability or accessibility needs. In doing so, you may:

• be breaking the law in not complying with the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulation 2018 and the Equality Act
• be inadvertently dismissing the needs of people who need to interact with the service
• fail service assessments and have to spend more time and public money to understand the needs of your users
• not be considering hidden disabilities that you are unaware of
• prevent people with disabilities from using the service in the future