Accessibility

Assessing accessibility opportunities in diabetes technology

Goals

• Initialize an inclusive design initiative

• Understand and compare the experience of using any diabetes medical device with vs. without vision, hearing, or dexterity impairments

• Rank impacts of design change opportunities for each group

Methodology

Step

1. IDIs with PWD with vision loss or blindness

2. Survey with PWD both with and without vision, dexterity, and hearing impairments

Reasoning

Unconfined discovery qual to uncover initial opportunities, understand how to conduct accessibility research/audits, and establish collaborative relationship with accessibility advocates

Quantify differences and similarities between groups to hierarchize impacts of issues and prioritize design changes

Impact

• Follow-up: accessibility audit of current products

• Follow-up: assessment of impairment prevalence among diabetes population, which led to widespread understanding of diabetes comorbidities and designing for a changing target market

• Standardized accessible code for future product development

• I took an accessibility research training and established accessible research practices for the UXR team

Top Insights

• Inaccessible diabetes tech forces blind or low-vision PWDs to use outdated technology, sacrifice independence by depending on sighted caregivers, develop cumbersome, sometimes dangerous workarounds for essential diabetes management tasks, and can face worse health outcomes.

• Many difficulties associated with accessibility issues were also difficult for those without accessibility issues

• Those with vision and dexterity impairments reported the highest negative impact on treatment and need specific design improvements