The Accessible Design Process: An AT&T Perspective

This article shares some of our experiences with accessible product design, identifies the challenges we faced when attempting to incorporate accessibility features into mainstream product lines, and recommends ways to improve the process of accessible design. We describe our experiences with four product categories: residential telephone products, a business telephone product line, a public card-operated telephone, and a communications assistant workstation for telecommunications relay service. In addition to describing the actual accessibility features identified and incorporated into the designs, we discuss the process used to achieve an accessible design and the factors determining if accessibility features were ultimately included.

Based on these experiences, we recommend ways to improve the process of accessible design for telecommunications products. We introduce an Electronic Industries Association (EIA) initiative, called the Seal of Accessibility, which will establish accessible design guidelines for consumer electronics products and provide a means for communicating the accessibility of products to consumers.