EcoLife
“Inclusivity makes society, accessibility is humanity.”
EcoLife is a project that aims to create an app to solve an issue in daily life; recycling. But also focusing on being accessible for the visually impaired and blind users. During the creation our main goal was to make it work on as many devices as possible, specifically visual aid software.
Our users
For this project we needed to represent both people with and without disabilities that wanted to get involved in recycling. We created some proto-users to illustrate the goals and pain points the users usually struggle with before getting to work.
Lo-Fi Prototype
We had a first prototype of the app that we wanted to test with the blind, the visually impaired and the visually unimpaired.
The idea was to not only help people to recycle properly by helping them with a checklist that indicated the item was ready to recycle, but also showing our users in real life the route the garbage truck was taking and where the recyclables were processed.
After a first test, we did our first iteration and coded it to test with screen readers.
Accessibility Testing
We had one of our blind users share their screen while testing our live prototype. He was describing out loud every action he was performing, this helped us make sure we didn't overlook any alternative texts or other important markers. He gave us feedback on features he'd like to see in an app like EcoLife which made it an extremely enriching experience.
Final Design
For our final design we made sure to allow the users to select what kind of trash they wanted to recycle: For example, paper and cardboard, and the state in which it needed to be.
After that the user would go to a collection point and scan a QR code to see live updates of the recycled trash and its location.
The visually impaired and blind users were made aware about the updates by having the app reading them out loud.
Conclusion and High Fidelity Prototype
This project threw light on the many challenges people with disabilities face while trying to use apps, since most of them never take their needs into consideration. The extra time we spent designing to make sure the app included as many users as possible was absolutely worth it and it was definitely very welcomed by people often erased by tech companies.​​
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Here's the high fidelity prototype of the final app: