Have you heard of accessibility? Often we discuss accessibility in terms of the physical world around us. Like does a building have only stairs or an elevator to the entrance? It’s not cool if a person can’t get into a building if they’re using a wheelchair.
Digital accessibility is important too.
While your use of a wheelchair might not affect how you access an interface, you could be blind or have difficulty seeing, deaf or hard of hearing, be unable to use a screen, a mouse, or a keyboard, or find them difficult to use with accuracy. You might be sensitive to motion or using devices for a long time. Others might have difficulty reading or understanding content.
Accessibility is the practice of accommodating these needs in the products we design. For example, I like to design big buttons for my interfaces. This means the text is easy to read and there’s a nice big button area to click on. Even if you struggle to be accurate with a mouse or a touch input.
Throughout this course, I will be sure to let you know of accessibility issues related to each topic. But I don’t know everything, I encourage you to do your own research and seek out resources related to your design use cases.
Digital accessibility isn’t just about being inclusive. It’s also a legal requirement in many countries. Many of these countries use the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as a framework for testing accessibility, and so that’s a good place to start. If you are looking for more information, I’ll add a further list of resources on the course site. Spoiler: I wrote a book about accessibility.
When it comes to digital accessibility, many of the needs of disabled people overlap with general usability. So if you are making your designs more accessible for some people, you’re usually making it more usable for everyone.
1:55 min