Atlantic Business Technologies, Inc.

Category: User Experience

  • The Most Important Step in a Website Redesign Project Plan

    The Most Important Step in a Website Redesign Project Plan

    You want to redesign your website! It’s tempting to want to jump right in and skip to design and development. However, skipping this important step could lead to costly delays, budget overruns and poor user experience. In fact, according to IBM, fixing problems in development costs 10 times more than fixing them in design, and fixing them after launch costs 100 times more. What’s the secret behind every smooth, on-time, and on-budget, user-friendly and all around successful website redesign project plan? 

    It’s the often-overlooked discovery phase. 

    In web and portal development, this early stage sets the foundation for everything that follows. It’s the hidden ingredient that ensures your project aligns with both your business goals and user needs, all while maintaining the budget and timeline that you sought to begin with. Without it, your project risks falling short of expectations, whether through misaligned priorities, user frustration, or missed opportunities.

    What is the Discovery Phase?

    The discovery phase is the first and the most important step in any web development project. It’s the process where we dig deep into understanding both business objectives and user needs. The discovery phase is about balancing these two critical elements—because a product that only satisfies one without the other is destined to fall short. By the end of this phase, we develop a detailed blueprint that guides the design, development, and launch of your product.

    At its core, discovery is about uncovering the following:

    • Business goals: What are the business drivers behind the redesign? Are you looking to increase conversions, improve brand perception, or enhance functionality? Defining these goals early ensures your redesign stays on track.
    • User needs: Who are your users, and what do they expect from your website? Gathering insights about user behaviors, pain points, and preferences will guide the redesign toward a user-friendly solution.
    • Technical requirements: What are the technical constraints or opportunities that need to be addressed? Whether it’s integrating with existing systems or ensuring site scalability, the discovery phase ensures your project plan is technically sound.

    The Benefits of a Comprehensive Discovery Phase

    Skipping or minimizing the discovery phase can lead to a number of issues that derail your website redesign. However, when done correctly, the discovery phase sets the foundation for a successful project. Let’s look at the benefits of a discovery process.

    1. Meeting Deadlines

    Without discovery, unforeseen technical challenges or unclear business goals are almost guaranteed to arise during development. These issues cause wasted time and missed deadlines as the team scrambles to address problems mid-project.
    With a clear roadmap from discovery, the development team can work more efficiently, reducing ambiguity and minimizing the need for rework or adjustments mid-project. This ensures the project stays on schedule.

    1. Budget

    Projects that skip discovery often face scope creep, where new features or adjustments are added without a clear plan. As the project expands unexpectedly, costs spiral out of control and the budget can become unmanageable. By establishing detailed requirements from the start, discovery helps prevent scope creep, ensuring that the project stays within the agreed budget and avoids unexpected costs.

    1. Clear Business & User Requirements

    Without a proper discovery phase, the project may proceed without a clear understanding of business objectives or user needs. This often results in a final product that fails to meet its intended goals, requiring expensive rework or leading to a failed launch. Discovery ensures alignment between business goals, user needs, and technical feasibility, reducing the chances of miscommunication and ensuring that the project meets both business and user objectives.

    1. Stakeholder Alignment

    Skipping the discovery phase often means key stakeholders are not involved early enough, leading to conflicting goals and last-minute changes during development, which can delay the project and increase costs. Discovery brings stakeholders into the process from the beginning, ensuring that all departments and decision-makers are aligned. This prevents conflicts later in the project and fosters smoother collaboration.

    Discovery Phase in a Website Redesign Project Plan

    Website Redesign Project Plan Timeline

    Without further adieu, here is a typical Discovery that you can incorporate into your Website Redesign Project Plan. 

    Let’s take a closer look at the key components of the discovery phase and how each contributes to the project’s success:

    1. Stakeholder Interviews: Understanding Business Goals

    Before any design or development begins, it’s crucial to gain a deep understanding of your business goals. This is done through stakeholder interviews, which are 1-1 meetings with key decision-makers and department heads to uncover what the business hopes to achieve with the website redesign.

    Stakeholder interview

    Key Questions Addressed:

    • What are the main objectives of the redesign? (e.g., increase conversions, improve brand perception, enhance user experience)
    • What are the current challenges with the existing website?
    • What business metrics or KPIs will measure the success of the new website?

    By engaging stakeholders early, we make sure that the redesign is aligned with the company’s larger strategic objectives. The insights gathered here lay the groundwork for the entire project, keeping business goals front and center throughout the process.

    2. Technical Audits: Ensuring Technical and Design Feasibility

    Before moving into design and development, we conduct technical audits to assess the current technical landscape and identify any constraints or opportunities. This step ensures that the technical and design decisions made during the project are realistic and feasible within the existing infrastructure.

    What a Technical Audit Includes:

    • Current Site Performance: How well is the current site performing in terms of speed, security, and scalability?
    • Analytics: How much traffic is normal for your website? Are there any common usage spikes?
    • Content: How many pages exist? If the URL structure changes during discovery we will also need this for our redirect plan. 
    • Technical: How much customization is there? Are there existing integrations we need to account for?

    The technical audit helps to identify potential risks and ensure that the new website will perform as expected, without encountering avoidable technical issues during development. This stage also highlights opportunities for optimization, such as improving site speed, enhancing security, or making the site more scalable.

    3. User Research: Understanding User Needs and Pain Points

    A successful website redesign isn’t just about meeting business goals—it’s also about delivering a seamless experience for your users. User research plays a critical role in understanding who your users are, what they expect, and where they encounter frustrations on the current site.

    Key User Research Activities

    Usability Testing: Usability testing is  aimed at evaluating the effectiveness, efficiency, and overall user-friendliness of a web site or application. We use real users and walk them through typical tasks to understand their pain points and behaviors.

    User Personas: Personas are semi-fictional representations of your target audience. They outline the demographic details, behaviors, needs, and goals of your users, helping the design team keep the audience in mind throughout the project.

    User Journeys: A user journey map visually illustrates the steps a user takes to achieve a goal on your website. By identifying touchpoints and pain points, we can streamline the user experience to make the website more intuitive and user-friendly.

    This research ensures that the redesign solves real user problems and creates an experience that meets their expectations. A user-centered approach leads to higher engagement, better satisfaction, and improved business outcomes.

    4. Information Architecture: Building the Structure of the Website

    Once we understand the business goals and user needs, it’s time to structure the website through Information Architecture (IA). IA is the blueprint that defines how content and information are organized across the site.

    Key IA Activities:

    • Sitemap Creation: Mapping out the main pages and subpages of the website, ensuring that users can easily find the information they’re looking for.
    • Content Hierarchy: Determining how content should be organized based on importance, user needs, and business priorities.
    • Navigation Design: Designing an intuitive navigation structure that helps users move through the site smoothly.

    Information Architecture is the backbone of your website. By organizing the content in a way that aligns with both business goals and user needs, we ensure that users can easily find what they need, and businesses can guide users toward desired actions, such as purchases or inquiries.

    5. Requirement Gathering: Keeping Track of Functionality

    From the moment discovery begins we must document all functionality into a requirements gathering tool such as a requirements matrix. This involves documenting the business, technical, and user needs uncovered during interviews, user research, and technical audits and assigning priorities based on project scope and timeline. This ensures that the design and development teams have clear direction on what the website must accomplish and how it should function.

    Business Requirements: Essential features or improvements tied to business objectives

    Technical Requirements: Platforms, tools, or integrations required (e.g., CMS, CRM), Performance, security, or scalability considerations

    User Requirements: Features or flows critical to enhancing user experience

    The requirements matrix organizes and prioritizes all these elements, helping the team focus on what’s most important and avoiding scope creep. This structured approach keeps the project on track, within budget, and aligned with both business and user goals.

    The Outcome of a Discovery-Driven Website Redesign Project Plan

    By conducting these steps during the discovery phase, we develop a comprehensive roadmap that serves as the foundation for your website redesign project plan. This roadmap outlines:

    • Clear business goals: Ensuring that the website redesign delivers real value to the business.
    • User-focused strategies: Ensuring that user experience is at the forefront of design and functionality.
    • Technical and design feasibility: Making sure that all design and development decisions are realistic and based on a solid technical understanding.

    This detailed plan ensures that all teams—whether design, development, or UX—are working toward the same goal, with both the business and its users kept at the center of every decision. With this roadmap in place, the website redesign stays on time, within budget, and aligned with business objectives, creating a website that performs for both the company and its customers.

    Ready to kick off your next website redesign project the right way? Atlantic BT can guide you through a discovery tailored to your business needs. Let’s talk!

  • Why We Included User Interviews in Our Website Improvement and So Should You

    Why We Included User Interviews in Our Website Improvement and So Should You

    Websites are not static objects, they need to scale and change as your company grows. Before long, websites can become stale, outdated and accumulate technical debt if left unattended. Therefore, website improvement needs to be a regular part of every company’s business practices. It can be difficult to know what parts of the website needs improving or agree internally which parts should be changed. User Interviews can be a big help in deciding where your organization should focus its improvement efforts.

    You Don’t Know Until You Ask

    Atlantic BT recently decided it was time to update the website to reflect our change and growth and reflect the needs of our users. Like many companies, our internal stakeholders had differing opinions on how the website should be redesigned. As a B2B business, we want to make sure our website is a pleasant experience for the people that make the decision to use our services. We weren’t sure any of our ideas for the website would actually accomplish that. 

    The solution may seem obvious, but the best way to find out what problems, desires and goals your customer has when interacting with your website is to ask them. So we did.

    How We Did It

    We didn’t just throw out a survey to a bunch of clients and website users either. That kind of research will tell you whether they like your website or not, but not why. So the results still wouldn’t help much with how to change your website. We asked five of our clients to do a user interview, a user experience method where researchers conduct one-on-one sessions with users to ask questions about a product or website. You can include either established clients or potential users within the same demographic as your clients, although you will get differing results. 

    Established clients will be able to tell you what they love about your company/product/service and whether your site represents that well. Potential clients can give you a fresh perspective on your website. They can tell you whether it is understandable right away without any background knowledge. 

    During our user interviews, we gave our clients tasks to complete and spoke aloud as they walked through the website, revealing what they did and didn’t like about it.

    Users Provide a Valuable Perspective

    Clients and customers can offer feedback with unique insights that may have never crossed your mind. During our user interviews, we found out from our clients that the navigation and content around our services was overly technical, which overwhelmed them. It turns out, our services really only made sense to people who work in the technology industry, which only make up a small percentage of our clients.

    Previous Atlantic BT website menu, included a lot of terms users did not understand.

    “I really think you should dumb down this menu with easier to understand terms. I don’t know what ‘application development’ is”

    Atlantic BT Client

    On the home page, users either skipped over the Services content altogether or had a few choice words about it.

    “I wouldn’t read this section the way it is now,” one participant said.

    “I probably wouldn’t spend too much time on this,” said another participant.

    Users skipped over Atlantic BT’s Service section on the home page.

    To fix the problem, we restructured our menu and service offerings to include more user-friendly verbiage. We organized our services by user needs, by our expertise, and by technology that we use. 

    User Interviews Can Align Team Members

    It’s very compelling to see first-hand what your clients, users, or customers think about your website. Having direct quotes makes the issues that they bring up difficult to ignore. When shared with team members, their insights can help get your team to understand problems with the website, prioritize and follow through with the plan.  

    After our user interviews, our team was able to come up with a strategy for the services on our website. Our new services section used more straightforward terminology and simplified the number of services to key ones that our clients understood.

    Atlantic BT’s new Services section after including user research.

    Summary

    When you work in an industry for a long time, it can be easy to forget what is common knowledge and what isn’t. This can make it difficult to know whether the content on your website is understandable or usable. When in doubt, it’s always a good idea to ask your clients for their opinion. Conducing User Interviews as part of your research has the following benefits for websites:

    • Determine if your messaging is resonating with your audience. 
    • Pinpoint specific problems in the website that need to be addressed
    • Discover if information is findable, intuitive and engaging. 
    • Align members of your team to what changes should be made.

    Contact Atlantic BT

    Annie Tudora has a Master’s degree in User Experience Design with years of industry experience to match. If you’re interested in learning how Annie’s expertise could help you build a more user-centric website, let’s chat. User interviews are a great place to start.

  • Why Your Website Needs Accessibility

    Why Your Website Needs Accessibility

    We’ve all heard the saying that “content is king” when it comes to the web. But what if you’re a sight-impaired person trying to access your favorite website? In a perfect world, your screen would read out all of the text on the page and give you the option to click on links. That’s where website accessibility works: to ensure that everyone has access to the same information and tools, regardless of disability or other factors.

    Most of us already know that there are rules for physical premises when it comes to accessibility for people with disabilities, either physical or socio-economic. Fewer know that accessibility can apply to online content, as well. 

    The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) mandates something called WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) compliance, which is a means of designing websites, tools, and technologies so that people with disabilities can use them as easily as possible. WCAG compliance covers several types of disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, neurological limitations such as Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s, and cognitive limitations such as learning disabilities. 

    The goal of ADA compliance is the creation of a website that uses a variety of different design and web development practices to assist people with disabilities in successfully navigating the site.

    Who Needs to Have an Accessible Website?

    The ADA requires state and local governments to be accessible under Title I and any business that is open to the public under Title III. 

    State and local government websites, as well as any private business that receives federal funding receive the most scrutiny for accessibility. An inaccessible website can bar users with disabilities from the government entity’s services, events, and activities.

    Websites are increasingly becoming accepted as public spaces and public spaces are required to be accessible in order to be ADA compliant. The Department of Justice has historically interpreted that ADA compliance applies to all “goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web.” Public websites may include those for:

    • Retail
    • Restaurants
    • Hotels, Inns, and Motels
    • Hospitals and Medical Offices
    • Banks
    • Theaters and Sports Arenas

    What are the Benefits of Accessibility?

    There are numerous benefits to making your website ADA compliant. In terms of customer retention, it’s a good idea to design web content to be as accessible to as many people as possible. Users with disabilities are a highly under-served segment, so ADA compliance can help your organization differentiate itself from competitors. Accessible sites and apps allow more people to engage with your organization, buy your products, or access your services. 

    Some other ways that Accessibility benefits your organization include:

    • Reduced risk of legal complications
    • Improved user experience for everyone
    • Improved website Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

    Simply put, managing your accessibility is part of building a modern, robust digital platform.

    How Do We Know We’re Compliant?

    Companies seeking ADA compliance often undergo a website accessibility audit that includes both automated and manual testing to ensure compliance. The audits help companies identify problems and put them on the path to improving their practices, reaching a broader audience, and avoiding discrimination or legal complications.

    What is the Process for ADA-Accessibility Audits?

    The process is quite straightforward. Once you identify a company that performs accessibility testing, you provide your contact information with the website you’d like the company to review. In particular, you will want your homepage, service/product pages, contact page, and other key landing pages reviewed. Once the report is completed, the company will follow up with a call to discuss their initial findings and share their detailed accessibility audit report with recommendations.

    If problems are suspected, the audit company will set up automated testing to catch code issues that make your site inaccessible. The experts may recommend that you update old, inaccessible document repositories to be compliant with modern standards, and can help you develop your accessibility remediation strategy and work with a trusted partner to ensure your site stays up to date.

    Consult a Professional Web Design and Development Company

    Atlantic BT is an award-winning technology firm located in Raleigh, NC. We offer enterprise web design, website accessibility testing, IT consulting, software development, cybersecurity, and cloud technology to help clients easily manage, secure, and scale their core technologies. We combine full-service digital marketing with custom software development and technology solutions. Our awards stem from outstanding results in all aspects of digital, from UX design to modernizing applications. For more information, contact us or call us at 919-518-0670.

  • Why User Testing is Critical for UX

    Why User Testing is Critical for UX

    Disjointed user experiences are a widespread marketing pain point, according to research conducted by Gartner. User testing is a powerful tool that can help businesses identify and rectify these disjointed UXs, enhancing website performance and ultimately leading to improved customer satisfaction and increased conversions.

    “Siloed UX approaches based on traditional channel mentality are preventing organizations from delivering a seamless digital customer user experience to internal and external audiences,” said the company. 

    In the past, user testing was a complex process, and it often involved collecting volunteers into labs and using high-tech solutions such as eye-tracking cameras. These high-tech solutions, of course, had high costs to go along with them. Luckily, times have changed, and companies are now offering a new generation of usability testing solutions and strategies.

    In Gartner’s report entitled, “Drive Seamless Digital Customer Experiences with Composable UX,” the company noted that a better strategy around customer data management and customer journey intelligence is needed to make composable UX attainable.

    What is Composable UX? 

    Forbes has noted that composable UX helps businesses keep up with the lightning speed of change. It flexes as circumstances shift, allowing for the real-time assembly, combination, and orchestration of individual customer employee experience capabilities from a robust set of building blocks: product, marketplace, CX ecosystem, and development. It’s labeled as “composable” to differentiate it from the brittle, inflexible user experiences of the past. 

    Why Is User Testing So Important?

    In order to serve your customers and enable your employees, you need to know what their needs are before you can begin to address them. (Guessing seldom works out for anyone.) User experience testing, of course, is the process of testing different aspects of the user experience to determine the best way for a solution, a website, or an app to interact with its core audience.

    The following are some of the most critical processes that must be undertaken to engage in effective user testing: 

    Usability testing. This involves putting a website to the test to see if usability problems are stopping your users from reaching their goals.

    Contextual inquiry. During this step, you’ll uncover opportunities for improvement by watching users interact with your sites and products.

    Surveys. There is no substitute for asking users directly about their experiences, so in this stage, you’ll gather large-scale feedback from customers on the questions that you need answers to. 

    Tree testing. This is a way for you to visualize your user experiences (as a decision tree) to figure out where your navigation might be confusing for users. 

    Card sorting. Understand how users group your content by hearing straight from them how they think your topics should be organized.

    Benchmarking. Learning from the best is still a great way to gain insight into the design of the user experience. Perform large-scale user testing to compare efficiency and effectiveness between different designs.

    Consult a Professional Web Design and Development Company

    If you’re in doubt, it’s worthwhile to turn to professionals to jump-start the user experience testing process.

    Atlantic BT is an award-winning technology firm located in Raleigh, NC. We offer enterprise web design, IT consulting, software development, cybersecurity, and cloud technology to help clients easily manage, secure, and scale their core technologies. We combine full-service digital transformations with custom software development and technology solutions. Our awards stem from outstanding results in all aspects of digital, from UX design to modernizing applications. For more information on how we can help improve your website performance with user testing, contact us or call us at 919-518-0670. 

  • Is a discovery process necessary for development projects?

    Is a discovery process necessary for development projects?

    Most people will agree there needs to be some level of planning before a project begins. But some may need convincing on spending thousands of dollars for what seems like a simple planning process. 

    A useful discovery process will go beyond standard timelines, budgets, and technology planning. In fact, a discovery is often needed to get to the root of the problem.

    Discoveries separate “core issues” from “nice to haves”. 

    The planning phase of a project should include the definition of what needs to be done – from which everything else proceeds. However, we often find differing perspectives on the definition of “what needs to be done.”

    Failing to fully understand desired outcomes can lead to unfavorable results. Scope creep could lead to budget and timeline overages. There’s a chance you’ll end up solving a problem that wasn’t the core issue. 

    Following a structured discovery process can ensure all of your bases are covered.

    The Discovery Pyramid ensures a full-picture diagnosis.

    At Atlantic BT, we like to describe our proven process in terms of the Discovery Pyramid. Each piece of this pyramid covers a crucial aspect of the total definition of the problem; skipping any one can negatively impact a project’s success.

    The key focus areas of the Discovery Pyramid are:

    Business Objectives – Determine the high-level business need that must be addressed, in terms of impact on sales, operational efficiency, market share, etc. This step also includes key objectives and constraints. Understanding the true business objectives sets the context and north star for further decision-making.

    Typical activities and deliverables include:

    User Research – These activities seek to understand your customer base, target audience, and/or key users, including their wants, needs, pain points and behavior patterns. Research is essential to providing a solution that truly meets user requirements, thus boosting customer satisfaction. 

    Typical activities include:

    • User Interviews
    • Persona workshop
    • Review client user data / market research
    • User workflows workshop

    Resulting deliverables typically include:

    • User Personas
    • User Journey Map or Service Blueprint (for complex workflows)

    Content & Design – An application is meant to deliver content and provide an interface for interaction with your firm. Content is the reason folks visit your site and content drives search engine results. Solid content and the design that delivers it go hand in hand. (“Design” meaning strategy, not visual mockups).  Marketing sites focus heavily in this area and may require extra steps.

    Typical activities include:

    Resulting deliverables typically include:

    Features & Functionality – Define all the details about how an application will deliver content, enable action, and combine with the design to meet user needs and deliver an outstanding experience. Ecommerce sites and business applications focus heavily in the features and functionality area.

    Typical activities include:

    Resulting deliverables typically include:

    Technical Solution – The needs and constraints determined from the above activities inform the technical solution. We’ll also need to review the technical audit of the existing solution, assess any integrations, and review your in-house skills and support abilities. From there, we create recommendations of technology base, platform, and services that meet needs cost-effectively. 

    Typical activities include:

    • System integration analysis
    • Code / database review

    Resulting deliverables typically include:

    What happens when you don’t follow the discovery process?

    We are often approached by folks that describe their needs starting in the middle of the pyramid: “we need a site redesign” or “I need to build this functionality”. While we can certainly start there, more context in the surrounding areas provides a more effective solution, thus we always back up to cover previous sections of the pyramid. 

    For example, a website redesign in support of expanding market reach requires a focus on search engine optimization. If the same site redesign was driven by an aging back-end platform, it may require a more extensive technical assessment and data migration plan. 

    We’ve also seen instances of clients asking for a redesign, thinking they would need web design and information architecture help. It turns out, most of the design work was around rethinking interactions, which ends up being a software development project.

    Discoveries should always precede solutions.

    All of the discovery steps focus on the why and what questions, rather than the how. In UX terms, they lie in the problem space rather than the solution space; you have to fully understand the problem before you can come up with the best solution. 

    Try to keep an open mind when going into projects. You may feel you’ve already diagnosed the core issue and know exactly what work is needed, but a third party can help shed some much needed light on the problem at hand. This level of focus and understanding will set you up for success in the development phase.

  • Atlantic BT’s Annie Tudora teams up with Ablr’s Kim Casey to present on Accessibility in Online Learning

    Atlantic BT’s Annie Tudora teams up with Ablr’s Kim Casey to present on Accessibility in Online Learning

    We are pleased to announce Atlantic BT’s User Experience Researcher, Annie Tudora, is teaming up with Ablr’s, Accessibility Operations Manager, Kim Casey to present at WPCampus 2021 Online on Tuesday, September 21 at 10 am EST. 

    WPCampus is a community of web professionals, educators, and people dedicated to supporting the convergence of WordPress in higher education. This free conference will cover a variety of topics surrounding web accessibility, WordPress and higher education. 

    Annie and Kim’s session will focus on the benefits and challenges of online learning for people with disabilities. Annie’s personal experience with navigating higher education through the lens of a disability inspires her to advocate for accessibility for all. Kim has over two decades of experience in creating accessible products and content. 

    You can watch the video here or read the transcript below.

    Watch her talk here – Empowering accessibility in the era of online learning.

    Annie Tudora  0:00  

    Thank you for joining us today for our lightning talk and powering accessibility in the era of online learning. I’m Annie Tudora, a User Experience Researcher at Atlantic BT. And I have my master’s degree in user experience design from Kent State University.

    Kim Casey  0:19  

    And I am Kim Casey, an Accessibility [Analyst] at Ablr, a digital accessibility firm that focuses on eliminating barriers for people with disabilities. And I have just over 20 years of experience developing accessible products and training resources.

    Annie Tudora  0:36  

    So here’s a picture of me and I’m super excited in this picture. And not only because I had just graduated with my bachelor’s in film and media at Georgia State University, but also because I had just finished what was the most difficult semester of my entire college career. I spent most of my bachelor’s degree limping around campus, and something to know about downtown Atlanta where Georgia State [is located]. The classroom buildings are very far apart. So it takes about a 15 to 20 minute walk to get from building to building. And after three years, I was diagnosed with osteonecrosis, also known as bone death. And several of my bones, and my knees and my ankle, my wrist and my hip have lost circulation and are very painful, and are essentially dead. So once I found this out, I had a very hard time getting around and my knees were very painful. 

    So I decided to spend the last semester in a wheelchair. And I quickly found out that the campus of Georgia State University was very difficult for someone in a wheelchair. The ramps were largely not up to code, and it made it very difficult for me to get up and down places. And the sidewalks in downtown Atlanta were very bumpy and had lots of hills. So within two weeks of using the wheelchair at Campus, I injured the cartilage in my chest and I was unable to push myself any longer. That meant that I had to rely on the kindness of my fellow classmates and my teachers to get me from class to class. And while I deeply appreciate the kindness that they showed me every day, while I was at school, it also felt really frustrating and demoralizing to have to rely on everyone else to do things that I was normally able to do. Even something as simple as getting to the bathroom. And there were days that were so hard for me that I had to call my then fiance to come get me from school because I was crying. 

    But after graduating, I decided that film and media was probably not the best career for me with my disability. So I went back to school, and got my Master’s at Kent State University in user experience design where I knew I would be able to create online experiences that would be accessible to everyone. My degree was entirely online. So I got to work from home, from my home office. I got better grades, and the experience was virtually stress free. Right after I graduated, I was able to get a job, a remote position at Atlantic BT as a user experience researcher and that’s where I am today with these remote accommodations, it felt like I didn’t even have a disability at all.

    Kim Casey 3:44  

    And Annie’s story is not the only one I’d like to share with you. [This is the] story of ABLR CEO, his name is John. He was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa in college, which means that your eyesight just kind of fades as you get older. We also found that he also found that it fades faster if you’re really stressed out. So once he was diagnosed, he tried to hide it and he didn’t really want to let anybody know that he was struggling with that condition. And resultantly ended up dropping out of college. So he struggled so much that he just realized that he wasn’t going to be able to make it with the way he was trying to do it at that time. He didn’t stop there though. 

    Thankfully, he kept traveling around and he was offered a job in Cameroon to set up a cell communications network. And he actually had an interesting experience there where they found out he was visually impaired and almost didn’t want him to go and try to talk him out of it and ended up giving him just six months to prove himself. And he did that and more in six months and so that was a great experience for him. And it gave him the motivation to return to college. 

    And so he applied for another new college and on the first day of orientation found himself inside a meeting hall where he was supposed to find his name tag on a table and find the correct seat. Unfortunately, he was not able to see the name tags. So he did the only thing he could think to do was reach out to the person standing next to him who happened to be the Dean of that college. And asked her to help him get to his chair and find his name tag. And she serendipitously has a child who has a disability as well and really encouraged him to embrace his disability, find out what resources are available, And to get the help he needs to succeed. And so that experience was great for him, because he was able to learn about what resources are available to people with visual impairments, and really opened up doors for him. He met his wife. He was just really able to participate in life like never before. And all sorts of new opportunities surfaced. 

    He ended up as CEO of ABLR, breaking down barriers for people with disabilities, so nobody else had to struggle like he did, when he didn’t know that there were resources available for him. And these stories are not unique. Globally, there are 1 billion people with a disability. And each person has their own story. Some like John struggle because they don’t know about available resources, some are embarrassed to ask for help. And like in Annie’s case, sometimes the available resources just aren’t enough. She couldn’t get from class to class, it was a real barrier. 

    So whether it’s a teacher only offering materials and paper format, where they’re not digitized, and a person with a visual impairment can’t read them. Or if it’s ramps, they’re just too steep, that a wheelchair can’t access, these things really can stop people from getting the most out of their education. What online learning gives you is kind of a forced condition where different resources and different learning types are available. 

    And so another one of my colleagues started his college career and found that none of the online learning resources were accessible. So instead of dropping out or really fighting battles with the accessibility department, he just offered to help them get their resources accessible, and it really opened their mind. And they created this partnership so that he could help them make the materials accessible, and in turn, then he got a better education. So it’s a partnership between the student and the school. And that’s how success really blossoms.

    Annie Tudora  7:38  

    So there’s a lot of potential benefits of online learning for those with disabilities. For one, as in with my story, there’s no need to navigate campus for those with physical disabilities or visual impairments. This can be extremely beneficial if they can do things online. recorded lectures can be helpful for certain people with learning disabilities. And of course, online learning can make recording lectures and reviewing them a lot easier. And online, you’re usually provided with a digital text to support learning. And this can be easier for screen readers as opposed to a paper text. This can also be enhanced by allowing magnification capabilities, adding alternative text and level of headings. And then there are auto generated subtitles for zoom. And you can record those zoom videos and review them later. 

    However, just because one thing can benefit some people with disabilities doesn’t mean that it benefits everybody with disabilities. And we’ve also seen a lot of challenges in the online learning space. So for one, online learning actually decreases the visibility of disabilities. So some people might have a visible illness, if they have a wheelchair or something like that, you might be able to tell that they have a disability. But for me, if I don’t use my wheelchair, then there’s no way for you to know if I have a disability or not. And that’s what we call an invisible illness. And in a research report in 2011 found that when students with disabilities study online, they were reluctant to disclose that they had a disability even in the face of inaccessible online learning material. So online learning can actually make it harder for teachers and educators to know who has a disability and what kind of accommodations they might need. So even though zoom may supply with automated closed captioning, they can also be very subpar and confusing, which could lead to even more confusion than before, but this can be solved by providing closed captioning on recorded videos or transcripts for media with video or sound. And factors such as home distractions, social isolation, and self motivation can be difficult for many people with learning disabilities, and even if you don’t have one. An inaccessible third party software can be a problem when a professor prefers a teaching supplement outside of the materials provided by the school, which may have been vetted for accessibility.

    Kim Casey  10:36  

    So that brings us to how accessible online learning can benefit anyone and why really, we should be looking into this. Online Learning has come a long way in terms of accessibility over the past couple of years, obviously, because of the pandemic, it’s sort of been a forced accessibility 101. But accessibility is a journey. So I think at the beginning, you kind of feel overwhelmed. It’s a lot of work. But then once you start thinking and incorporating it into your everyday life and all your regular lessons. Then it becomes something that you just maintain and nurture over the years. And with a commitment to accessibility. The benefits to everyone include; you’re building your content on a good foundation, so that you’re thinking about accessibility at the start. You’re trying to anticipate any needs that might arise from everyone in your audience, and you’re considering your audience regardless of their ability. You’re more intentional with your content. So you really are starting to think and break down, “how am I best going to reach this student?” and “how best can I present this information in a way that will help everybody learn?” And you’re also making your online or your content uniform, so that everything is the same. Everybody gets the same experience, whether it be in all digital, or if it’s a visual format. Everyone’s getting the same content, and just increasing awareness about accessibility and understanding different learning types and different needs of online learning consumption.

    Annie Tudora 12:11  

    I believe in the social model of disability, which states that a disability is “the impact of an inaccessible socially constructed environment on a person with an impairment rather than something inherent in the person with disability”. Which means, that the problem isn’t that people have disabilities, the problem is that society and our social order hasn’t created solutions and accessible experiences for everyone. The pandemic has presented us with a unique opportunity to increase accessibility and online learning. With the correct considerations and implementations, we can give those with disabilities more opportunities than ever before. And with those implementations in place, people with disabilities will find themselves in a world where their disability doesn’t impair them in their learning or chances for success. 

    Here’s our work cited.

    Kim Casey  13:15  

    And we realize that accessibility is a big subject matter. So we welcome any chance to speak with you about any questions you might have. You can contact me at kim.kc@ablr360.com. I also provided our ABLR, LinkedIn link and a QR code that will take you directly to our website if you want to find out more about digital accessibility and just creating accessible content. There’s also contact information for Annie. Her email is Annie Tudora, and that’s spelled t u d. o ra at Atlantic bt.com. The Atlantic bt website is there as well along with LinkedIn and we thank you for joining us today. It’s been our pleasure to talk about accessibility and online learning and we welcome the chance to talk with you soon. Thank you.

    Anne Tudora 14:08  

    Bye. Thank you