How to Make Quantitative Research Accessible to People with Disabilities

In other posts, I discussed reasons to make research accessible, the types of disabilities and how to be polite to people with disabilities, and how to do accessible participant recruiting and qualitative research. Now let's get into quantitative research.

Ask about survey platform compliance

Making sure quantitative research accessible is relatively straightforward - ask the account representative of the platform you plan to use if they are WCAG 2.0 or 2.1 compliant. I try to make that question a regular part of the set of questions I ask a salesperson, demonstrating a new survey platform to me. Even though inaccessibility can be a costly legal liability, I am always shocked by how often I hear that they don't know if they are compliant. I then ask them to keep me informed if they ever know for sure or have made any strides towards being accessible.

Even though I am usually disappointed by the answers, I feel asking is an essential part of making progress. If, as the person who will be paying for the platform, show I care about accessibility, and it matters in deciding which platform I choose, the service providers will be that much more likely to take the issue seriously and make the necessary changes. You can be part of that financial calculus as well.

Make sure your customizations are compliant

Lots of survey platforms offer the ability to customize the look and feel of your surveys. Customization options make you, the researcher, the last line of defense for accessibility.

• Make sure your color contrasts are strong enough. You can use an online tool to tell if you need to change the color pallet to help people who are colorblind differentiate between text, links, buttons, and error messages.

• People with low vision need text fields to be close to row labels because if they're using a magnifying function to read the screen, they can get lost if the areas are too far apart.

• Write using simple, clear, and explicit language to ensure people with cognitive disabilities or don't consider your native language to be their most familiar language.

• Make sure all of your videos use captions, not just subtitles. Subtitles only capture dialogue, while captions describe other elements, like laughter, ambient music, and applause.

• Use alternative text to describe elements of pictures for people who use screen readers.

Default to simple question formats

Whenever possible, use the most straightforward question formats: radio buttons, checkboxes, and open text.

I understand that it's fun to program sliders and drag and drops on the chance these formats will boost your respondent engagement. But questions that require the use of a mouse or trackpad exclude people who use other means of navigating screens.

You can also ask your survey platform provider if there are specific question formats they know are not WCAG compliant and avoid using them.

That's about it for making sure surveys are accessible. Remember, if your surveys aren't accessible, your sample cannot be truly representative, and that is doing your clients a disservice.

That's about it for what I know about making research accessible to people with disabilities. If you have advice of your own, you can use the comments to share your knowledge.

Good luck, and do the work. It's worth it.