What is Accessible Design?

Accessible design is adhering to accessibility standards, that define the designing of products, services, and devices for the use of people that are disabled but not to the extent of their usability. Accessible designers create products that fulfill the need of disabled persons (such as color-blind users) or anyone facing situational barriers (such as being bound to multi-task).

Want to know more about Web Accessibility? Let’s discuss it in a little bit more detail.

What is Web Accessibility?

Web Accessibility is ensuring that there are no barriers that prevent your users to interact, access or use different software products (the simplest form being a website). The concept of accessibility is strongly related to universal design. Universal accessibility is the process of designing products that can be used by people with the widest range of abilities so that they can operate products with the use of a variety of possible solutions.

There are different points that web accessibility can cover such as:

• Motorized/Mobility: People who face difficulties in using their hands and are suffering from tremors, loss of muscle control and muscle slowness. People who have challenges from Cerebral Parsey, Muscular Dystrophy, have suffered strokes and any kind of conditions in which a user would face difficulties in using their hands.
• Visual: Users who face challenges with poor eyesight, color blindness, blindness and various other types of eye impairments.
• Auditory: Users who struggle with hard of listening and are suffering from deafness or hearing impairments.
• Seizures: Users who suffer from photo epileptic seizures that occur due to visual strokes and flashing effects/moving objects.
• Intellectual Disability: Users who suffer from dyscalculia, dyslexia and developmental disabilities.
• Mental Disability: Users who suffer from a cognitive disability that can affect various origins such as memory, affection, development, and ability to solve logical problems.

Essential Parts of Accessibility Design

Web accessibility is based upon following essential components such as:

• Content — the information on a web page or web application, including:
  natural information such as text, images, and sounds
  code or markup that defines the structure, presentation, etc.
• Web browsers, media players, and other “user agents”
• Assistive technology, in some cases — screen readers, alternative keyboards, switches, scanning software, etc.
• Users’ knowledge, experiences, and in some cases, adaptive strategies using the web
• Developers — designers, coders, authors, etc., including developers with disabilities and users who contribute content
• Authoring tools — software that creates websites
• Evaluation tools — web accessibility evaluation tools, HTML validators, CSS validators, etc.

Essential Principles About Web Accessibility

Many organizations view inclusive design as a hindrance to innovation. Web accessibility and inclusive design also pose challenges in a data-driven product management practice, where you work to solve the “majority’s” pain points. It’s important to remember that accessible design is not only law in many places like the EU, the United States and parts of Canada, but as product managers and digital leaders, it’s our job to make our products and services accessible for everyone. Inclusive design does not need to be hard, there are ways to make accessible design easy for designers, web developers and everyone else on your digital team to create and design accessible web content that allows disabled persons to interact, perceive, understand and navigate with your software products or services.

Accessible Design and Innovation

Web developers have to understand that accessibility standards do not create barriers in the way of innovation. Inclusive design does not force a web developer to create clutter, boring and uninspired software. Web accessibility introduces the set of restrictions that you can use after selecting the base of your design. These web limitations will allow you to explore different ideas and lead you to create products that can easily be used by all your users. Users that include people that are deaf or face difficulties in hearing, people that are color blind and have visual disabilities or those who are facing mobility impairments. Accessibility limitations allow digital teams to design according to the likings of users both young and old, and those who want to enjoy high-quality experiences.

Media and Web Accessibility

Universal accessibility allows designers to create different types of media content (that include hyperlinks, videos, icons, and images) such as descriptive use of ALT tags. A web designer should understand the importance of subtitles that increase the understanding and ability of the user.

Contrast and Web Accessibility

When designing accessible content, you must ensure that there is a contrast between the background and text. For example, popular accessible design color contrasts, for instance, white text on a black background. The UK government has perhaps one of the most accessible websites, take a look at https://www.gov.uk/.

According to WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), 1:45 is the minimum contrast ratio that a designer can use to create accessible content. For example, if the size of your text is 24 pixels, 19m pixels or bold large, then #959595 is the best gray color that is suitable for the background of your text. This contrast guideline help users who are facing color blindness and low vision issues to read your text easily. Different tools help designers to find accessible color palate that is suitable for their design and give the best contrast ratio.

Forms and Web Accessibility Standards

When developing forms, one must be a little bit careful, as they pose a particular challenge. Boundaries in the form of borders and labels, for forms, are vital for users with mobility impairment and those who are suffering from a cognitive disability. It is important to know the size and location for the people who are using standard adaptive pointing devices. The label of the website will tell the user about the purpose of your content, maintain the usefulness of the content when the focus is placed on the target point and remain at the same place even after completing the task.

Navigation & Links for Web Accessibility

The use of navigation and descriptive links will be vitally important to allow your users to be able to point, click and navigate throughout your product. Common mistake designers and developers make is they simply just write “Click here” — while this seems simple enough for fully abled persons, it does not describe everything for people that are suffering from physical and mental impairments.

When creating links and navigation for your products, you should underline or highlight your links; this will help users with low visual ability to learn more about your content. People with color blindness face difficulties in seeing your links. So you must use a high contrast color scheme for your hyperlinks. Use a special template for large clickable areas that help people with mental development issues to understand that they can learn more by clicking on your descriptive link.

Build Products for Everyone

When setting out to build accessible products and services, go beyond your two or three target personas. Develop user personas of users who have different abilities and use different accessibility tools. Understanding what accessibility tools individuals who have physical and mental challenges utilize, makes designing for accessibility significantly easier. The universal designs of your product will make your content more visible and accessible by people that are facing different types of accessibility challenges.

In terms of innovation, accessibility actually forces you to be more creative, solve bigger problems and help the most underserved segment of digital users. We all aspire to be digital leaders to make real change, what is more, impactful than helping those that need it the most?