What Else Can A Redesign Project Improve Accessibility? – The Case Of AJet

While reading the news about Maricopa, I was reminded of the recently redesigned AJet app. As the Turkish Technology accessibility team, we are responsible for the accessibility of the AJet digital touchpoints. Since our accessibility team established one year after the release of AJet web and mobile app, our first work was working on accessibility of existing app and website. And we couldn’t do everything for accessibility. Some of the improvements made during the redesign process gave us great opportunities to enhance accessibility.

• Contrast Issues: AJet’s primary colors are light blue and white, which naturally caused many contrast issues. Although we remediated most issues in older AJet versions by slightly darkening the primary color, occasional overlooked areas still remained. During the redesign, the color palette was changed. Working together with the design teams, we achieved contrast compliance not only to meet standards but also to provide a more natural, good‑UX experience.
• Some “In Itself Not Accessible” Components: Image‑of‑text carousels… In older AJet versions, a carousel composed of image‑of‑text was placed at the top of the page so that campaigns and announcements would be visible. Even though we added alt text to the images, it was still an accessibility issue for low‑vision users. We communicated design guidelines to the design teams and discussed with the technical team about delivering the image‑of‑text as plain text, but the required effort was high. During the redesign we eliminated the image‑of‑text carousel. Now we have an accessible slider under the booker component that contains text and supporting visuals. Sometimes it is much easier to change the design directly rather than trying to make something accessible.
• Dark Mode: As a partially-sighted user, dark mode had been my dream since the first day we started working on AJet. I know that dark mode alone is not a solution for accessibility issues, but offering alternatives is also important. Working with the design team from the beginning to integrate dark mode was a great experience, rather than adding it later.
• AI Chatbot: AJet Assistant was launched together with the redesign. We have plans for chatbot accessibility and solutions that can simplify aviation processes for people with disabilities. The launch of AI support with the redesign opened the door to new projects for our accessibility team.