Digital Accessibility Opens the Realm to Inclusive Online Experiences
What is meant by designing for accessibility?
Creating products or environments accessible to all individuals is the essence of accessibility design. Embracing accessibility means considering the diverse needs of your users, including those within and beyond your intended audience, people with disabilities, and individuals from various cultural backgrounds and regions.
💡 Let’s talk about straws.
Not everyone can skip the straw!
Plastic straws harm the environment and marine life. However, it’s vital to acknowledge that many individuals with disabilities rely on plastic straws for their daily eating and drinking needs. These straws offer unique benefits like repositioning, safe use with hot liquids, allergen-free qualities, ease of sanitization, durability, and affordability, with minimal risk of injury or choking.
This isn’t just about design but about survival.
Empower everyone to decide. No one should feel ashamed for using an essential accessibility tool. #InclusiveDesign
Read in detail: @[disabilitytogether](<https://www.instagram.com/disabilitytogether/>)
Designing with accessibility in mind doesn’t just cater to the disabled; it serves everyone.
Design encompasses a wide realm, touching every aspect of our lives. Our focus today is on digital accessibility. Let’s delve into it.
Brainstorming Time Imagine a ramp beside a staircase. Who will benefit from it? Is it solely for individuals using wheelchairs? Or are there additional users to consider?
Leave your answers in the comments below.
Enhancing Digital Accessibility
Digital accessibility involves constructing digital content and applications that cater to a diverse range of individuals, encompassing those with visual, motor, auditory, speech, or cognitive impairments.
For those aiming to enhance website accessibility, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) serve as a valuable starting point. This resource offers a comprehensive framework for businesses to ensure their web content is accessible to all individuals. It also prevents discrimination against those with disabilities in public domains. This implies that businesses must provide “reasonable accommodations” for all users, whether in a physical store or a digital environment.
Why Design for Accessibility?
Curb-Cut Effect
- The concept illustrates how designs aimed at aiding individuals with disabilities frequently offer benefits to a broader range of users.
- While closed captions were initially developed for those with hearing impairments, they have proven valuable for viewing videos in noisy settings as well. (And let’s not overlook the enjoyment of K-dramas with subtitles.👻)
Legal Reasons
- According to our examination of legal submissions, federal courts throughout the nation have received an excess of 8,000 lawsuits related to digital accessibility, filed or transferred between 2017 and 2020. (Data from the United States)
7 Easy-to-Implement Guidelines to Design a More Accessible Web
- Add Enough Color Contrast
Ensure clear distinction between screen elements. Vary sizes or colors for contrast, like dark text on light background. Low color contrast can hinder text legibility for those with low vision.
Source to check:
Website:https://contrastchecker.com/ https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
Figma plugin: https://usecontrast.com/
2. Avoid Relying Solely on Colors
Don’t just apply colour as a visual cue to convey essential information, demonstrate an action, or prompt a response. Your content will be difficult for those to grasp who have poor vision or who are colour blind. Try to use a different indicator besides colour, like text labels or patterns. Don’t just use coloured text to display mistakes; also consider including an icon or a message title. Consider adding a visual cue such as font weight or underline text style to linked text in a paragraph, so the links speak out. {2 images}
💡 A good trick is to print your design in black and white and see if you can still understand everything in it.
3. Design Usable Focus States
Have you noticed the blue outlines that sometimes show up around links, inputs, and buttons? These outlines are called focus indicators.
When navigating your website, focus indicators let users know which element is currently getting keyboard focus and help them locate themselves.
These are used by people who are:
- Blind or require screen readers,
- Individuals with limited mobility,
- Individuals who have suffered injuries like carpal tunnel,
- Power users who prefer this type of navigation.
- Oh, and some of us use the keyboard as their primary way of navigating the web!
Focus indicators can be created to match your site aesthetic and the style of your website. Make a state very noticeable and starkly contrasted to stand out from the rest of the information.
4. Use Labels with Form Fields and Inputs
Form fields have undergone changes recently, favoring a minimalist trend in modern designs, leaving out crucial elements for accessibility: well-defined boundaries and visible tags. One major form design error is using placeholder text as labels. This diminishes readability due to low contrast and makes it challenging to remember field purposes. Such placeholders complicate matters for users with cognitive and visual impairments.
Additionally, the Tab key is commonly used by screen readers to jump between input fields when navigating a screen. The <label> elements are read for each form control. Any placeholder text that is not a label is often ignored.
5. Offer alternative text for images and non-textual content
Screen readers aid visually impaired users in “listening” to web content. These tools convert text into speech for better website understanding. Alt text, also termed “alt attributes” or “alt descriptions,” is embedded in HTML code to explain an image’s appearance and purpose on a page.
- Instead of merely saying “photo,” try to explain what is happening in the picture and how it relates to the story.
- Google is developing an AI for image captioning that can 94% accurately describe images. We hope to start seeing this model used in a variety of products; it is open-sourced . While we wait, we should manually add text that explains the purpose and significance of each image in our content.
6. Use Correct Markup on Your Content
Headings, titles, body text, and more establish the hierarchy within our design.
Using larger font sizes for titles aids readers in grasping the content sequence. Likewise, heading labels guide text-to-speech tools, helping those with low vision understand page structure hierarchically.
7. Support Keyboard Navigation
One of the most important parts of web accessibility is keyboard accessibility. A keyboard is required to navigate content for those with motor disabilities, the blind who use screen readers, those who lack motor skills, and even power users.
The placement of interactive elements on a page is crucial, and the navigation must be logical and easy to use. The order of tabs should follow the visual flow of the page thais left to right, top to bottom — header, main navigation, content buttons and inputs, and finally the footer.
