By Oliver Greiner
The number of people struggling with vision problems is large. Nevertheless, almost no sites are optimized to solve this problem and only a few people are concerned with getting an overview of what exactly the problem looks like for the target group.
In order to gain precisely this overview, our team has been conducting interviews since the beginning of 2019 to find out what problems people with visual impairments face on the internet on a daily basis. The focus of the interviews was to develop and implement solutions based on the findings.
During the interviews, it was both impressive and depressing to learn about the daily challenges faced by the target group. In order to find out where the core problems lie, we created a table with various keywords that were to be sorted by importance by those affected. These included points such as information on the page, font color, brightness, contrast, font size and others. It was interesting to see that the points font size, font color and contrast were at the top of the list for all interviewees, regardless of the respective disease.
"Sometimes it's just a bit difficult in terms of size if you want to do research. It's exhausting and frustrating"
This was followed by an evaluation of the interviews and subsequent brainstorming. Since the above-mentioned points of color and size appeared to be decisive, we tackled this problem first. Together with our programmer, we developed a program that has exactly these features that the target group mentioned as crucial.
The program called Eye-Able is integrated directly into the website and is therefore browser-independent and easy to use with a click. Eye-Able allows you to change all font colors and background colors and thus contrast and also adjust the font size as desired.
Of course, this program is just the beginning. We intend to solve further problems and do everything we can to ensure that these programs are also integrated into websites and are therefore available to the target group directly on the page, regardless of the device used.