Building for accessibility: how we redesigned the customer wait screen

The customer wait screen is the part of Readylert that the restaurant never sees but every customer uses. It sits open on a phone for 5–15 minutes, then delivers an alert. For most customers, that alert arrives via a full-screen animation with sound and vibration. But we were consistently hearing that a subset of customers were missing notifications — and accessibility was the reason.

Who we were missing

User research identified three groups of customers who weren't reliably receiving alerts with the original design. Customers with hearing impairments who relied on vibration alone — which the original screen didn't control separately from sound. Customers with visual impairments using VoiceOver or TalkBack, for whom the animated alert wasn't announcing itself. And customers in environments with high ambient noise (the exact environment a food venue creates), where a single sound didn't cut through.

Changes in the redesign

Vibration patterns

The original screen triggered a single short vibration. The redesign uses a repeating pattern — three short pulses, pause, three short pulses — which is distinctly different from a standard notification vibration and much harder to miss. The pattern repeats for 8 seconds unless the customer taps the screen.

Sound design

We replaced the single chime with a distinct two-tone rising sound at higher volume. The sound now repeats three times with a 1.5-second gap, giving customers who are in conversation or listening to something time to register it. We also added a vendor option to choose between three alert sounds — different venues have different acoustic environments.

Large text and high contrast

The alert screen now detects system accessibility preferences. If the device has Larger Text or Display Zoom enabled, the alert text scales accordingly. If the device has High Contrast enabled (iOS) or Accessibility > Colour Correction active (Android), the alert uses a pure white-on-black scheme with no mid-grey elements.

Screen reader announcement

The alert element now includes an ARIA live region with `role='alert'` and `aria-live='assertive'`. When the notification fires, VoiceOver and TalkBack automatically announce 'Your order is ready' without requiring the customer to navigate to the element. This was a one-line change with significant impact for the 1 in 6 people who use a screen reader at least occasionally.

Results

After rolling out the redesign across all Readylert accounts, we tracked notification acknowledgement rates (the percentage of 'ready' events that resulted in a customer collection within 5 minutes). Acknowledgement rates increased by 11 percentage points across the platform, with the sharpest improvements at high-noise venues — exactly the environment where the previous design struggled most.

Accessibility is not a separate track. The changes that made Readylert more reliable for customers with disabilities made it more reliable for everyone. That's usually how it goes.