Celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day With LastPass
Every user deserves an accessible web experience. Today marks Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a day to raise awareness of digital access and inclusion for the more than one billion people worldwide living with disabilities.
Securing your digital life requires digital accessibility, and LastPass strives to be everyone’s go-to password manager. However, we recognise this cannot happen until we have adapted the way in which our product works or is presented to end-users with disabilities. On this 10th Global Accessibility Awareness Day, LastPass is excited to share the initial steps we’ve taken to ensure our password manager can be used by everyone.
Building a foundation for inclusivity and accessibility
As of today, LastPass has enabled keyboard navigation, updated proper colour contrast and readability, and has added regions and language tags to allow users to navigate with screen readers and keyboards more easily within the vault navigation across three main browsers.
Let’s take a closer look at the vault navigation accessibility updates:
- Keyboard Operation: Keyboard navigation has been enabled. While this benefits all users who prefer to navigate the web with their keyboard, it also removes access barriers for those who are unable to use a mouse and/or utilise screen readers.
- Screen Reader Navigation: Users can more easily and quickly navigate to different sections of the application when using screen readers and keyboards.
- Colour: Proper contrast in colours has been applied according to accessibility standards. In this way, those with visual impairments will be able to more easily differentiate text and interactive elements. It will also mitigate screen fatigue for those working in bright lighting conditions.
- Font: Updated font and spacing has been implemented to ensure readability for users with visual impairments.
- Language: Language tags have been updated to ensure that screen readers can operate within the selected language for users with visual impairments.
Our work has only just begun
This is a significant step in ensuring LastPass is inclusive and can be used by all. While we are eager to bring these updates to our LastPass community, we know this is just the first step in our journey to remove usage barriers.
“I see the commitment that LastPass is taking due to the fact that their Customer Success team worked with us, and now, they have an accessibility patch coming out,” says Lucy Greco, Web Accessibility Evangelist at UC Berkeley. “This shows that a significant amount of resources were used. To me, even if an organisation hasn’t achieved everything on their to-do list, putting the commitment in is the important part. We’ll eventually get there. It’s a journey of small steps, not large.”
“The majority of data breaches can be traced back to simple slip-ups in password security. Hackers don’t discriminate when it comes to compromising personal or professional accounts to gain access to precious data, and neither should the tools that are responsible for keeping users safe.” Says Dan DeMichele, VP of Product, LastPass by LogMeIn. “With more than one billion people worldwide living with disabilities, it is our responsibility as a technology provider to create web and mobile experiences that are inclusive and available to all. LastPass strives to be everyone’s go-to password manager, but we recognise this cannot happen until we have adapted the way in which our product works or is presented to end-users with disabilities.”
“While we are excited to bring updates that make LastPass accessible for everyone in our community, we know this is just the first step in our journey to removing usage barriers. Achieving full accessibility is a long and constant road and moving forward, we will be striving to design product updates with accessibility in mind. In our digital lives, whether it be work or play, having the assurance that your digital life is secure is something everyone deserves.”
