For an updated version of this information with live links, see the web page www.w3.org/WAI/users/involving
Involving users early in projects helps you understand real-world accessibility issues, such as how people with disabilities and older people use the web with adaptive strategies and assistive technologies.
Involving users early helps you implement more effective accessibility solutions. It also broadens your perspective in a way that can lead you to discover new ways of thinking about your product that will make it work better for more people in more situations.
This applies when designing and developing:
This page gets you started reaping the benefits of involving users — specifically people with disabilities and older people with accessibility needs due to aging — early and throughout different types of projects. A separate page focuses on including users in evaluation for web development projects.
Involving users early in web projects results in better products for users, more efficient development, and other benefits to project stakeholders.
When developers understand accessibility issues, they can implement more effective accessibility solutions; for example, their website will work better and be more usable for people with disabilities, older users, and other target groups. Making websites and web tools more usable for people with a range of disabilities improves general usability for everybody, including people without disabilities. (You could say that involving users with disabilities in your development project gives you improved usability for free.)
This benefits not only users, but also stakeholders; for example, when websites get increased use and other business benefits from increased accessibility.
Including users in the development process helps you more efficiently develop accessible products that work well for real users in real situations, thus maximizing your return on investment (ROI) in accessibility.
When you understand how people use the web and your particular product, you can:
All these benefit developers, project managers, and other stakeholders.
When designers and developers see people with disabilities use products like theirs, most are highly motivated by a new understanding of accessibility. Rather than seeing accessibility as only a checklist item, the real-life experience shows the human side of accessibility. Designers and developers get a different level of understanding of the opportunity for their work to impact lives.
When managers and stakeholders share such experiences of people with disabilities using their products, it often helps get resources budgeted and scheduled to address accessibility well.
This section focuses on including real people in the process. Note that accessibility considerations should be addressed even earlier in the project; really from project inception so that accessibility is considered early in project planning, budgeting, scheduling, and such. Accessibility should also be included in your user-centered design processes (UCD) or other design methodologies and techniques; for example, ensure that the use cases, user analysis, personas, scenarios, workflows, design walkthroughs, etc. include people with disabilities and older users.
Below are the basics that you can do yourself to include users in your projects. If you have the resources, consider getting assistance from accessibility, disability, and user-centered design specialists.
As early as possible in your project:
For example, for websites, web applications, and web tools:
For more in this, see Involving Users in Evaluating Web Accessibility, especially the sections on Analyzing Accessibility Issues and Drawing Conclusions and Reporting.
Caution: Carefully consider all input and avoid assuming that input from one person with a disability applies to all people with disabilities. A person with a disability does not necessarily know how other people with the same disability interact with the web, nor know enough about other disabilities to provide valid guidance on other accessibility issues. Getting input from a range of users is best.
People with disabilities are as diverse as any people. They have diverse experiences, expectations, and preferences. They use diverse interaction techniques, adaptive strategies, and assistive technology configurations. People have different disabilities: auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual — and some have multiple disabilities. Even within one category, there is extreme variation; for example, "visual disability" includes people who have been totally blind since birth, people who have distortion in their central vision from age-related degeneration, and people who temporarily have blurry vision from an injury or disease.
Include users with a variety of disabilities and user characteristics. Most projects have limited time and budget and cannot include many different users. Selecting the optimum number of users with the best suited
characteristics can be difficult. There are resources on the web that provide
guidance on selecting participants with disabilities; for example, determining participant characteristics
and finding participants with disabilities.
A primary consideration in selecting users is their experience interacting with the web. For example, some assistive technologies (AT) are complicated and difficult to learn. A user with insufficient experience may not know how to use the AT effectively. On the other hand, a very advanced user might know uncommon work-arounds to overcome problems in a website that the "average" user would not be able to handle.
In the early stages when you are first learning how people with disabilities interact with the web, it is usually best to get people with a fairly high experience level. (Involving Users in Evaluating Web Accessibility says more about different experience levels in later evaluation phases.)
Follow common practices for working with people informally and formally, for example:
There are resources on the web that provide
detailed guidance on working with users; for example, Interacting with People with Disabilities, Assistive Technology and Location, and The RESPECT Code of Practice.
While including users with disabilities and older users with accessibility needs is key to making your accessibility efforts more effective and more efficient, that alone cannot address all issues. Even large projects cannot cover the diversity of disabilities, adaptive strategies, and assistive technologies. That is the role of accessibility standards.
This document briefly addresses a few points of a very complex topic. Many resources on other aspects of involving users throughout projects are available on the web, such as:
links to recommendations for end users, user organizations, and others in the standardization process. provides detailed guidance on incorporating accessibility throughout projects. For example, see Incorporating Accessibility Early and Throughout.