Introduction
The client was one of the most reputed online job portals in the United State. They receive more than half a million job applications every day. They were looking forward to improving the accessibility of their existing application.
Challenge:
As the online employment website focused on the B2C market, the audience size is quite larger. It has the facility to post jobs across the industries for different job profiles. On the other hand, the job seekers keep checking for the newly posted job for their respective profiles. As per their analysis of the existing user base, around 7% of the users are physically disabled and most of the profiles are incomplete due to certain reasons.
They also received many complaints from the employer profiles as well as they have reported that many team members who were physically disabled team members found it difficult to access the website. For the job providers, two major accessibility and usability impacts productivity. Altogether, it was hampering the user-experience and customer retention rate.
The client wanted their application accessible both for the job seeker and job poster. They approached Accessibility Tech Solutions based on their vendor evolution system and we supported them to address this accessibility issue for both the parallel running engagement.
Solution:
The engagement with the Requirement Elicitation Phase was the first segment of the process. We gathered all the key information and researched to get the problem’s root. Our analyzing process includes stakeholder and end customer analysis, sizing and segmentation of the end-users on the bases of their disabilities, application’s functional walkthrough, technical walkthrough & code walkthrough and finally all the tickets, emails and issues received from the end users.
After the evaluation of the problems, we work on the automated as well as manual testing to ensure the proper operation of the functionalities.
Firstly, we evaluate the application through a mix of automated accessibility tools rather than sticking to only one tool. We cross validate all the aspects to get better coverage with detailed testing. To validate keyboard functionality, our team executed manual testing to find out navigation and form validation.
We identified a few problems like problems created by auto play animation, use of pop-ups and use of small icons for actionable command. We suggested removal of the pop-ups and auto play animation and replacing the small button to bigger size to increase the accessibility.
Result:
After the testing and re-development process, the job portal has received excellent response from both job seekers and job posters. 16% increment of disabled users database within 2 months of releasing an improved version of the app. The company received much positive feedback after the accessibility updates.
Technology Used:
AChecker, Wave and Chrome accessibility developer tools extension