Accessibility design is a very important and crucial topic for designers, web developers and other stakeholders because if the design is not accessible you are just forcing a lot of population to not your product or service.

For me Accessibility means trying to design a service or a product which will be accessible by people from diverse backgrounds. Accessibility provides a sense of inclusion to people who are being left out due to their abilities. There can be different types of disabilities like auditory, visual, motor, cognitive.

There are other benefits as well which can play a major role in improving the business.

1. Improving the usability for disabled people will eventually also improve the user experience for majority of people.

2. There is a large population of people who are disabled and if you are not designing for them then you are just adding a barrier to your own business.

3. Provides a sense on inclusion to people who are disabled.

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I have talked about accessibility and its importance in design but how to improve it?

Accessibility can be improved by usability testing and including participants with disabilities during the designing process. I will be focusing only on usability testing here. You can follow the accessibility guidelines from WCAG 2.1. These guidelines are carefully developed by W3C to improve accessibility. You can also refer other accessibility guidelines which can be specific to people with autism, dyslexia etc.

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There can be different usability tests which you can perform even when you are not an accessibility expert.

1. Manual testing is the first step which can be done by you. You just have to browse through the website or the app and look for the errors. These errors can be related to alignment, contrast, font-size, input field etc.

2. The next step is to use automatic testing which can be done by software's like WAVE, AccessScan etc. Here you have to run the software on the website you want to test and look for the errors it comes up with, errors can be like missing alternative text, empty links. These errors are not visible by manual testing and that is why you need to perform automatic testing.

3. In the third step you should use accessibility technologies like screen reader, magnifier. These tests will give you more information like jumping of screen reader due to improper structuring of the HTML code. Even if this looks like a small problem it can be disastrous to people having to rely on screen reader to achieve their daily tasks.

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These are some of the techniques which you can use as a designer even when you are not an accessibility expert. You should keep all this in mind while designing because every design decision has power to include or exclude people.