The missing link – the user perspective on accessibility
Compliance testing and expert audits are useful but complex. Our unique User Panel Reports can help you prioritise what truly matters to users. Users with a variety of disabilities will find the most important accessibility issues on your website or app. Our certified experts explain how to solve or improve these issues.
Accessibility audit reports tend to be expensive, technical and overwhelmingly lengthy. If the goal is to remediate exactly everything, most organisations have a daunting task in front of them. We believe your resources can be used more wisely – prioritising what really matters to users first.
Our user panel consists of users who are NOT accessibility experts. They are experts in being end users with disabilities, who are trained in finding and explaining issues that matter to them. The minimum number of user groups represented in the panel is eight:
- Low vision
- Blind screen reader user
- Hard of hearing
- Motor impairment
- Intellectual disability
- Neurodivergent
- Dyslectic
If the tested object requires speech input, has sign language videos or blinking objects, the panel is complemented with relevant user groups (speech impairment, deaf sign language user, epilepsy).
What can you expect from the User Panel Report?
The user panel participants have a wide range of needs, abilities and assistive technology, and you are guaranteed to learn things about the tested interface that you haven’t thought of before. The report captures the main issues from the user perspective. Many organisations describe that it is easier to get buy-in for accessibility internally when problems are highlighted by people who are actually affected by them. The report will help you prioritise remediation activities and can also provide input to refine and clarify your accessibility statement.
What you cannot expect from the User Panel Report:
This is not an exhaustive review of all legal requirements on accessibility, there is no guarantee that the monitoring authority will not find more inaccessible items than our user panel did. But if you follow the recommendations of the report, you can rest assured that you have solved things that your visitors will appreciate.
Complement, not duplicate:
The User Panel Report is called UPR internally. This abbreviation usually refers to
The Universal Periodic Review, which is a mechanism of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council (HRC). The UPR of the UN periodically examines the human rights performance of all UN Member States. It is intended to complement, not duplicate, the work of other human rights mechanisms. Accessibility is a human right, and our own UPR is a good complement to expert audits, compliance reports and user testing. We therefore find the coincidence quite fitting.