Accessibility debt compounds faster than technical debt
Kitebird became the first Nordic ticketing app to pass a full accessibility audit. Hannah Berg on why fixing it late cost four times as much, and how to stop the debt building up again.
- Thursday 10 June
- Day 2
- 10:30–11:10
- 40 minutes
- Studio
- First floor, river side
- Talk
- Intermediate
Kitebird sells most of the bus, tram and ferry tickets in Sweden and Norway. Three years ago an independent audit found 214 accessibility failures in the app, from unlabelled buttons to a ticket screen that a screen reader announced in the wrong order. Some of the failures were on screens designed only months earlier.
Hannah led the work to fix them, and kept the receipts. Problems that would have taken an hour at the design stage took days once they were built, tested and shipped, and longer still once other screens depended on them. On average the late fixes cost four times as much as early ones would have.
This talk is about the practices that stopped the debt returning: accessibility criteria written before design starts, components that make the accessible choice the easy one, and regular sessions with disabled travellers that the whole team attends. Kitebird has passed two audits since.
What you will take away
- Evidence and figures for making the case to fix accessibility early
- Acceptance criteria and component rules that prevent the most common failures
- How to run sessions with disabled users that the whole team learns from
