Conducting usability testing with blind users- research facilitation tips

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“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail “

— Benjamin Franklin

Before facilitating my first research sessions with blind users at Vision Australia, I prepared. In this post, I’m going to outline what I did, and dive into some pragmatic tips on running these sessions so you too can be prepared.

First, I performed a literature review to understand the online and search behaviours of blind and vision impaired users, and to quell some common myths in our delivery teams such as:

• “Blind users know how to use screen readers” — False. Not all do, just like not all sighted users are tech power users.
• “Blind users would just tab backwards” to excuse us not developing a usable tab order or correctly implementing ARIA interrupts. Also false.

As designers we know that assumptions are dangerous things, and that if you don’t talk to, and observe, actual users interacting with your product, you can’t design something that actually works for them.

Vedran Arnautovic forged the path ahead of me by running SEEK’s first usability testing with blind users, and he shared four lessons from facilitating usability testing sessions with…