Accessibility: Does design for everyone possible?
Last week in our UX class, we learned about accessibility (A11Y). I only knew about accessibility is for people with disabilities. Honestly, I didn’t know about what the disabled are and how broad the category was. Also, how much laws are involved compared our day to day visual sites.
Some people might have born with color blindness. I didn’t notice about color blindness was a thing until I’ve heard a speech from the designer at Invision Pablo Stanley. He said he found color blindness when he was working as a graphic designer and printing the wrong colors. That means he didn’t know that he was color blind for almost twenty years. But he didn’t regress because of color blindness, but he studied around the RGB chart and memorized where located.
From what I’ve learned accessibility means people with disabilities can acquire the same information, participate in the same activities, and actively produce as well as consume content available to all other users.
Disability not only means physical disability, but it can be mental, aging factors, slow internet, operating system, devices, and locations. Whether this is temporary or permanent, there is a large segment of people who are not able to use our product.
What I’ve learned about accessibility is that as designers, we have to think about the best way to show our product without showing. The best way to approach is by using the design system.
There is a tool called a screen reader; this is a tool for the people who can’t see. You can initiate by telling Siri to “Turn on VoiceOver(VO).” For our assignment, we had to analyze an apparel site with a screen reader. I never tried using a screen reader to see the site, and it was a shocking experience.
Here is a list of why it was a shocking experience.
- Links and more links
Even the most well-known apparel site is not user friendly with the screen reader. There is no way to buy a product if you are blind.
To go to the product details page, you have to go through the home page (with all the listed items and links), product category page, then a list of the product page. Listening to all the links and the items were ridiculously frustrating.
- Popups
Most of all, the sites that we went over in class had popups. Most of them were for an email subscription. However, the problem is that the screen reader doesn’t recognize that there is a popup on the home screen. And it starts to read what’s on the homepage, not the popup.
- Automated carousel
Most apparel site, they have a short tagline below or above the menu for free shipping. But when it rotates, it gets annoying. Every time it rotates, the screen reader reads out loud what’s new on the screen. Even if I’m reading about the product.
Conclusion
What I’ve learned from this exercise is that the design system matters. The screen readers read based on the hierarchy of the text. Also, for screen readers, the icons are not usable. Especially when some icons were ‘unpronounceable’ because it doesn’t have an alt tag. For the carousel, it’s an unnecessary feature for blinds because they hear the lists of items, not how they work.
Through this exercise, I’ve learned design for everyone will be possible if we could think of all the disabilities. And design for everyone should not be a finite goal, which means that it should not be the ultimate goal. Design for everyone should be an infinite goal. We have to try our best to think about our users and how they could access our product. Our goal is not to be forever sustainable design but to practice and reach many users as possible with access and usability.
