Recruiting users with accessibility needs

The more criteria you add to your recruitment screener, the longer it can take to find participants. To get enough people with accessibility needs in your study, you may need to relax other criteria. For example, instead of looking for screen reader users who opened a bank account in the last 3 months, you might need to extend this criterion to 6 months.

It’s common for people to have multiple impairments, and no person fits neatly into defined categories. Concentrate on people’s access needs rather than their specific disabilities. For example, cast your net for screen-reader users and magnification software users instead of visually impaired users. You can do this by asking participants about their assistive technology use. For example, “Do you use any assistive products to use computers on a daily basis?”