I feel for you! The effect of empathy exercises on accessibility awareness

Abstract

Challenges related to adopting accessibility practices in the development process mainly revolve around a lack of accessibility awareness among practitioners, including designers, developers, and user experience professionals. Empathy exercises play a key role in sensitizing these practitioners to the importance of differences, thereby increasing their awareness of the diversity of users’ needs. This study explores the changes in prospective practitioners’ empathic advocacy regarding accessibility concerns. Participants simulated the roles of individuals with motor impairments using a keyboard and individuals with visual impairments relying on a screen reader to access and navigate digital content. Results showed that empathy exercises effectively raised accessibility awareness of participants and their user experience journey. Initially, participants were highly positive toward the websites they evaluated and did not consider accessibility issues on the websites. However, their attitudes toward the websites changed statistically significantly after completing keyboard and screen reader exercises.